The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 07 (of 12)

William Hazlitt was the bad boy of Romantic-era criticism: a man who brought passion, prejudice, and sharp elbows to the business of judging books. This seventh volume of his collected essays finds him at his most characteristically brilliant, dissecting the invisible architecture of prose and verse, probing the strange logic of dreams, and sitting in judgment on how writers conduct themselves on the page. Here Hazlitt asks why poets so often stumble when they abandon their natural rhythms for the flat plains of mere prose. He interrogates the great authors of his age with an intimate, sometimes merciless eye, extracting from their styles the secret grammar of their minds. The essays on dreams feel almost clairvoyant, peering into the unconscious decades before Freud gave it a name. What makes Hazlitt endure is not dusty scholarship but his willingness to be personally, passionately wrong about everything he discusses. He wrote criticism that reads like conversation with a brilliant, opinionated friend who has read everything and forgets nothing. This volume is for anyone curious about where modern literary criticism truly began, and for readers who want to hear one of the great English prose stylists think out loud about the machinery behind great writing.