The Plain Speaker: The Key Essays

The Plain Speaker was the last great original work of William Hazlitt (1778-1830), the finest prose writer of the romantic period. It is written with characteristic passion, and displays his erudition and wit to fine effect in some of his most important essays: ‘On the Prose-Style of Poets’, ‘On the Conversation of Authors’, ‘On Reason and Imagination’, and ‘On Envy’, to name a few. In this selection from the two-volume Plain Speaker , Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu have given priority to essays that address key critical issues both in romantic studies today and the poetics of prose.The volume contains a brilliant introduction to the central themes of the volume by Tom Paulin who reads Hazlitt’s improvisatory, intensely physical and tactile prose, along a dazzling line of critical discourse that ranges from Burke to Barthes and Derrida, embracing en route, Lawrence and Hughes, Picasso and Pollock, and Stravinsky. Appended are: the ‘Advertisement’ to the Paris edition of Table Talk in which Hazlitt speaks of combining literary and conversational styles; ‘A Half-length’ portrait by Hazlitt of the Tory politician and reviewer John Wilson Croker, an impassioned piece of writing revealed here to have been of demonstrable importance to Charles Dickens; and another portrait in words, this time of Hazlitt, by John Hamilton Reynolds, the friend of Keats.