Young's conjectures reconsidered (dedikált példány) [antikvár]

Angol Filológiai Tanulmányok IV. Hungarian Studies in English IV. Debrecen, 1969 Hungary Kálmán Ruttkay YOUNG'S CONJECTURES RECONSIDERED Talking of Night Thoughts Herbert Croft, who supplied the larger part of Doctor Johnson's Life of Young, says, "By these extraordinary poems, written after he was sixty, it was the desire of Young to be principally known. He entitled the four volumes which he published himself, The Works of the Author of the Night Thoughts."1 In the paragraphs added by Johnson, we are told that it is difficult "to give any general character" to Young's poems, "for he has no uniformity of manner", and „at different times [he] had different modes of poetical excellence in view"; and "he is no more like himself in his different productions than he is like others". The final verdict is that "with all his defects, he was a man of genius and a poet."2 Commenting on a few poems, and looking for their respective distinguishing qualities, Johnson finds in Night Thoughts "a very wide display of original poetry, variegated with deep reflections and striking allusions, a wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers of every hue and of every order The excellence of this work is not exactness, but copiousness ; particular lines are not to be regarded; the power is in the whole, and in the whole there is a magnificence like that ascribed to Chinese Plantation, the magnificence of vast and endless diversity."3 With the rise of literary history, and no doubt partly owing to the immense popularity of the poem in continental Europe, interest in Night Thoughts became practically exclusive of the rest of Young's bulky, but heterogeneous oeuvre, and Johnson's near-contemporary critical appreciation of this particular work came to be sanctioned by the selective, retrospective view of later generations. Although spontaneous enthusiasm for the poem has been totally deflated, Young still holds his status as the author of Night Thoughts, even among those who think of the poem as "famous but tedious" and "destitute of initiative and inspiration alike" ;4 and whether or not he is labelled as a pre-romantic, early romantic poet, or forerunner of the Romantic Movement, or even more vaguely a poet of transition, he is generally placed in literary histories off the main, traditional stream of 18th-century English poetry usually called neoclassical or Augustan whatever this may mean. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, II. World's Classics, no. 84. Repr. 1964. p. 424. 2 Ibid. p. 439. 3 Ibid. p. 437. 4 J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism, 11th and 18tli Centuries. Repr. University Paperbacks, no. 175. 1966. p. 12. 5 Ángo! filológiai tanulmányok 65