William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man

About this book

Romanticism is where the modern age begins and Hazlitt was its most articulate spokesman. No one else had the ability to see it whole; no one else knew so many of its politicians poets and philosophers. In this first full biography Duncan Wu draws upon over a decade of archival research to explore all aspects of Hazlitts life from his early aspirations to become a painter his engagement with revolutionary politics his rise to prominence as one of Englands greatest literary critics and the disillusionment and poverty of his final years. Along the way Wu reveals countless new details concerning Hazlitts relationships with Wordsworth Coleridge Shelley Keats William Godwin J. M. W. Turner and other important figures of the Romantic era. But Wu sees Hazlitt as an essentially modern writer who took political sketch-writing to a new level invented sports commentary as we know it and created the essay-form as it is practiced in our own time. Painstakingly researched and filled with original insight this biography benefits also from Wus New Writings of William Hazlitt many of which make their appearance here illuminating obscure passages of Hazlitts life.