Overview
These essays by critic and poet Donald Davie explore the 18th century—its literature, its religion and politics, and its culture in the broadest sense. Critically engaged are Berkeley, Swift, Goldsmith, Smart, Cowper, Johnson, the Augustan lyric, the hymn writers, the Dissenters, and diction and irony. Areas of culture are made accessible that Romanticism and lazy reading have fenced off as dull and closed.Author Biography
Donald Davie was the author of Under Briggflatts, Slavic Excursions, Studies in Ezra Pound, Older Masters, With the Grain: Thomas Hardy and Modern British Poetry, Two Ways Out of Whitman: American Essays, and Collected Poems.