Chapter 10 - Arts of Structure and the Rhythm of the Lives

Summary

When the Lives first appeared as “Prefaces,” the final, resonant, paragraph was the conclusion of the “Life of Gray.” But when individual “Lives” were printed separately from the poems, this particular grace was replaced by the possibility of reading with more continuity from one “Life” to the next. Such integration highlights internal transitions, changes and shifts of topic and tone; gradations of critical engagement mark Johnson’s developing interpretation of his task. Each “Life” inscribes an individual career; this is placed in the context of other “Lives” to draw attention to ends and beginnings. Johnson thereby resurrects within his late eighteenth-century present the ghosts of a 150-year poetical past. He actualizes this past in the fictional imagination of the living. The artistic moral of the Lives arises from the succession of births and deaths of poets whose company was the late-life mental habitation of a critic who found solitude unbearable.