#hazlitt

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Grace in women has more effect than beauty.

- William Hazlitt

A portrait of HM The Queen on the cover of Australian Women’s Weekly titled, ‘New Portrait for the Grenadier Guards’. 23rd May 1956.

[empirearchives]

Herman Melville on Napoleon’s love for Ossian

Context: Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, originally as Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763), and later combined under the title The Poems of Ossian.

“I am rejoiced to see Hazlitt speak for Ossian. There is nothing more contemptable in that contemptable man (tho' good poet, in his department) Wordsworth, than his contempt for Ossian. And nothing that more raises my idea of Napoleon than his great admiration for him.—The loneliness of the spirit of Ossian harmonized with the loneliness of the greatness of Napoleon.”

Melville wrote this around 1862 in the margins of his copy of Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Comic Writers and Lectures on the English Poets

Source: Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography - Volume 2, p. 436

[captainknell]

Coming soon to a Captain Knell near you 😁

I had a dream that my husband had a secret stash of auction finds, where he had some Napoleonic urns. I told him the dream and he said, "Well now I have to know." And looked at the auctions after we had already discussed that we need to stop 😅😅 No urns, but there were these...

[the-shooting-star]

Jess Zimmerman, Hunger makes me (from hazlitt)

[inprnt]

"When Mountains Were Ugly" by Zoe van Dijk on INPRNT

[shimyereh]

Poets are winged animals, and can cleave the air, like birds, with ease to themselves and delight to the beholders; but like those ‘feathered, two-legged things,’ when they light upon the ground of prose and matter-of-fact, they seem not to have the same use of their feet. —William Hazlitt, “On the prose-style of poets” [1822]

[scientologisabethmoss]

Southern Golems | Hazlitt

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it threatened to wash away a major part of the American South's Jewish history—a tough notion to sustain and preserve even in the best of times.

i remember reading this piece back in 2016 and feeling bowled over by its profundity and the difficult questions it asks about the nature of collective identity. i still think about this piece on a regular basis. it does feel a little dated in some ways considering the increasing prevalence of anti-semitic attacks over the past few years - the “sword of anti-semitism” doesn’t actually hang as far away as many of us may have been lulled into thinking - but most of what andrew paul writes about still rings very true. how does a historically marginalized group retain a sense of shared identity outside of its marginalization? is that marginalization the only truly shared experience between people of that group? what does it mean for the endurance of that culture if the group no longer experiences oppression? justice, equality, peace - these are all things jewish communities have strived for over centuries, but is anything lost if or when those goals are achieved?

none of this is to imply that anti-semitism is a thing of the past or that there aren’t enriching experiences and customs that are part of being jewish. but many of those experiences and customs vary depending on what denomination you belong to, what part of the world your judaism originates from, or if you even practice the religion. it’s so hard to say if there’s anything as largely unifying as shared oppression, no matter how bleak that sounds.

i don’t think there are any easy answers, but in the three and a half years since i first read this piece, i’ve thought about these questions not only in relation to my identity as a jew but also as a woman. again, no easy answers. i think these questions can be asked about many different identities too.

[triste-le-roy]

Cover to Janet Ruth Heller’s Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama—University of Missouri Press Edition (unknown artist/designer, 1990).

(via Janet Ruth Heller)