Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Laurie Kane Lew

Critical Essay by Laurie Kane Lew

SOURCE: "Collection and Recollection: William Hazlitt and the Poetics of Memory," in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 36, No. 3, Fall, 1997, pp. 349-89.

In the following essay, Lew discusses Hazlitt's essays as a series of portraits from which Lew determines his theory of memory and his understanding of artistic appreciation.

"For my part," Hazlitt wrote in 1827, "I set out in life with the French Revolution, and that event had considerable influence on my early feelings, as on those of others."¹ Mourning the loss, not just of his own, but of the universal possibilities for "Life" and "Liberty," which were entailed in the failure of the French Revolution, Hazlitt continued:

Since the future was barred to my progress, I have turned for consolation to the past, gathering up the fragments of my early recollections, and putting them into a form that might live. It is thus, when we find...
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