Keats, Shelley and Shakespeare

“He took his soul as he would a bottle of rich red wine, and shook it up, and held it against the light to watch it settle down. No hurry, no worry; a deliberate intensity. No fear of public opinion either; no terror and trembling before any judge but his own conscience.” (The Evolution of Keats’s Mind) “Imagine one unique medium, allowing of every inward change of feeling with no outward change of form. Imagine something which combines the freedom of prose with the sonority of rhyme, produces the effect of neither and is called blank verse.” (The Blending of Prose, Blank Verse and Rhymed Verse in Romeo and Juliet) “Humour in literature is nothing but the psychological study of individual exaggerations, made in a sympathetic spirit, guided and enlightened but not attenuated by reason. Such is the humour that was, if not created, at least revived, renewed, reinstated and definitely established as a literary form by Addison.” (Addison’s Humour: Its Matter and Its Form) This collection of nine essays and nine studies by Mary Suddard (1888–1909) contains literary criticism on the great minds of English literature. Apart from the eponymous writers, the book also features pieces on Chaucer, Swift, and Wordsworth, among others. Often brief and to-the-point, Suddard is nevertheless capable of picturesque, captivating language, thus doing her subjects justice. Composed during the final years of her life, these texts give a glimpse of a career that an untimely death precluded.