A Grandeza de Samuel Johnson

Um interessante artigo escrito por Jeffrey Hart sobre um autor absolutamente desconhecido na selva, o gigante Samuel Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s achievement is so impressive that we tend to forget its very high-risk background. In his maturity, Johnson possessed a regal quality. He had produced his Dictionary of the English Language and been awarded an honorary degree by Oxford, from which he had been too poor to graduate. He was famous as the essayist of The Rambler and The Idler. He had written two great poems, his Juvenalian imitations, as well as other fine poems. Alexander Pope seems to have recognized him as his poetic successor. Johnson edited an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and his “Preface” to the plays is a classic statement of literary criticism. In his philosophical tale, Rasselas, Johnson wrote in what F. R. Leavis sought to define as the central tradition of English prose. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets surely stands as one of the permanent works of eighteenth-century English literature, ranking with Gulliver’s Travels, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and Burke’s Reflections