This chapter explores David Ferry’s poetical recreations of Johnsonian prose under the aspect of “compassion.” Attention is initially focussed on Ferry’s poetical re-working of a passage from the “Life of Pope” on Pope’s physical disablements. The poem “Johnson on Pope – from the Lives of the Poets” (1960) is compelling. The chapter highlights how Johnson’s critical prose can be closely associated with the language of poetry. With each reading his language sinks deeper into our consciousnesses and eludes paraphrase. Also discussed are lines from Ferry’s “That Evening at Dinner” and use of a passage from Johnson’s review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Enquiry (1757). Through the language of his modern poem Ferry brings out the poignancy of suffering in the closing stages of life. This discussion is reinforced by a close analysis of Johnson on the final years of Jonathan Swift from the “Life of Swift.” Ferry’s formula – that of “unsentimental pity” – is then the basis for a closing examination of the final decline of the poet William Collins, one of the poets from the Lives of the Poets Johnson had known in person.

This chapter extends philosophical comparison to Montaigne, whose first translator, Florio, was Shakespeare’s friend. The chapter focusses on likenesses and unlikenesses, but brings out a common wisdom. There are confluences of nature and taste. Both find pleasure the central motivation for literary study. Their essays take different forms but assert Reason’s instability; Montaigne’s array of topics remains prescient of Johnson’s. Thus, the “ondoyant et divers” qualities of Montaigne are reflected in the “mingled” drama Johnson attributed to Shakespeare; likewise, the Johnsonian flux of experience links Johnson’s Rasselas with Montaigne’s “Of Experience.” The tendency of Imagination to dominate reason recalls, similarly, Montaigne’s “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde.” The effort to live according to nature is defeated by nature. The chapter concludes with discussion of the Lives. Montaigne’s sense of the random and various ways by which life comes to an end anticipates Johnson’s accounts of the deaths of the poets.

The Introduction offers a rationale for the first general analysis for a number of years of Samuel Johnson’s literary criticism. It sets forth the distinctive emphasis of the new volume and justifies its focus on Johnson’s “criteria of the heart.” This formulation points to the emotional foundation for many of Johnson’s literary judgments. How Johnson’s emotional demands count as criteria is then explained and the connection between the chapters is spelled out. Each explores Johnson’s critical artistry or aspects of his thought – the application of philosophical rigor to statements of critical opinion. The Introduction stresses the poetical character of Johnson’s critical prose and looks forward to the prose of the Lives of the Poets; a passage from this work has served as the basis for David Ferry’s poetical recreation of Johnson. The introductory excursus suggests that categories commonly employed to explain Johnson’s criticism in historical terms will always strike the wrong note. They make unwarranted assumptions about the nature and progress of criticism and disfigure our sense of Johnson’s place within critical history.

The theme of Time is the philosophical issue of this chapter – the perplexity of how we can at once exist in time and observe time as it flows “over” our heads, or “before us” as a stream. Johnson shares an ambition to disentangle such problems with philosophers. But the need to mark time as a self-accounting is an emotional determinant of Johnson. Johnson’s reckoning is connected to life’s possibilities and limits, to his religion, to the pleasures of literature and to his experience of writers whose work seemed so much longer than it was. Johnson is a literary artist on time; his words have philosophical value and effect; but his treatment recalls the metaphorical temper of poetry. Johnson allows us access to a consciousness partitioned off by the specializations of philosophy and folds us back into our own consciousness. He gives us an experience of what it means to be in time and out of time as a shared condition. This is elusive, ironic, comic and tragic; it is one and indivisible, as a function of General Nature, indefinable because universal.

This chapter turns to the emotional sources of Johnson’s poetical criticism. The chapter examines the contrast between Johnson’s response to the overblown dramas of Dryden and his enthusiasm for the power of Alexander’s Feast (1697). Attention then moves to Johnson’s taste for poetry deriving from genuine sorrow when this is compared with the confected grievings of Milton’s Lycidas. But Johnson’s emotional consciousness eschews excess. His neo-Latin verse, for example, seems to shield Johnson from memories that might be too painful to express in English. Reinforcing this vulnerability are Johnson’s emotional state on the death of his wife and his disordered feelings at the news of the widowed Mrs. Thrale’s marriage to Piozzi. Unbearable loss is then explored by reference to a scene from Rasselas and through a passage from the Preface to Shakespeare on tragedy. The deaths of Shakespeare’s heroines caused him intense pain; the combination of tragic with comic scenes as “mingled” drama supplied its own intensity, as Hamlet illustrates.

Johnson’s critical relationship with Thomas Warton is the subject of this chapter. The chapter examines their respective approaches to the writing of poetical history. Warton, as antiquarian, brings old poetry into the light; Johnson brings out the present value of poetry already known. Warton reads past societies through their lost literatures and by measuring the rational relation of historical causes to historical effects; Johnson’s concern is poetry as a source of pleasure and consolation. Warton is often highly digressive as a poetical historian; Johnson is frequently condensed, direct and economical. But the two friends also have much in common, not least their focus upon the literary past as such. This is recalled in Johnson’s work on the Harleian Library catalogue; his sense of the history of the language is manifest in his Dictionary etymologies and his glosses on Shakespearean language. As critics and poetical historians, they share a sense of poetry’s improvement over time. Warton’s audience is in the main the curious reader; Johnson’s is the common reader. But this implies no diminution in the curiosity Johnson brought to the poetical past.

This chapter suggests how Johnson gained from his acquaintance with the criticism of John Dennis. Johnson’s remarks on Shakespeare, Addison and Pope are all shaped by his reflections on the older critic, whose work Johnson quotes more fully than he does any other. Johnson’s response to Dennis is usually to disagree; but there is also respect, and acknowledgment that Dennis had good points to make about Pope’s Essay on Criticism, a poem that was for Johnson a success. Dennis’s reflections on Shakespeare and his complaints that Shakespeare failed to obey decorum trigger Johnson’s most eloquent passages in the Preface. In Johnson’s note to King Lear, where Johnson is lamenting the death of Cordelia, it is to Dennis that Johnson turns when calibrating his own uncertain yet distressed reactions to the play. Similarly, Dennis’s attack on the most celebrated of eighteenth-century tragedies, Addison’s Cato, offered the opportunity for a vivid comparison between a poet of manners and a “poet of nature.” There is truth as well as satire in Johnson’s description of Dennis as a “formidable assailant.” Johnson fulfills an obligation of fairness to his critical past.

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.