William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830)

Hazlitt is a minor figure who is unlikely to show up on your GRE.  I included him here because he did appear on a number of practice exams that I took.

William Hazlitt was an English writer remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, often esteemed the greatest English literary critic after Samuel Johnson. Indeed, Hazlitt's writings and remarks on Shakespeare's plays and characters rival only those of Johnson in their depth, insight, originality, and imagination.

Famous for never losing his revolutionary principles, Hazlitt attacked those he saw as 'apostates' with the most rigour, seeing their move towards conservatism as a personal betrayal. He felt admiration for Edmund Burke and pity for Coleridge, but saved the most vitriol for Wordsworth and the revolutionary-turned poet laureate Robert Southey. He had an affair with Sarah Walker, a maid at his lodging house, which caused him to have something of a breakdown and publish all their correspondence in a pamphlet, Liber Amoris. This was seized upon by the right-wing press and was used to destroy his distinguished journalistic career with scandal.

Hazlitt put forward radical political thinking which was proto-socialist and well ahead of his time and was a strong supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte, writing a four-volume biography of him. He had his admirers, but was so against the institutions of the time that he became further and further disillusioned and removed from public life. He died in poverty on 18th September 1830 and is buried in St. Anne’s Churchyard, Soho, London.

Quotes:

“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.”

of Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
"I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's rays glittering in the puddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the way-side, crushed, bleeding lifeless; but now, bursting from the deadly bands that 'bound them,
'With Styx nine times round them,'

"my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch the golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure, with longing infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge."
          --from the essay "My First Acquaintance with Poets"