The Principle of Poetry
In an essay on Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus, Hazlitt lays out in richly metaphorical poetic prose, what he considers to be the foundational principles of poetry. After first confirming that poetry offers a dazzling experience that aims for effect in which everything is done with excess, he gets really figurative:
“It has its altars and its victims, sacrifices, human sacrifices. Kings, priests, nobles, are its train-bearers, tyrants and slaves its executioners.”
“On the Fear of Death”
In an essay exploring the topic of death, Hazlitt credits an ambiguous collective “some” with what is in fact a beautifully constructed metaphor for the experience of life itself:
“It has been thought by some that life is like the exploring of a passage that grows narrower and darker the farther we advance, without a possibility of ever turning back, and where we are stifled for want of breath at last.”
"The Indian Jugglers"
In this essay on a form of entertainment that modern readers have seen so often they never really even get the chance to experience it as a kind of magic except when so young they have time to forget it, Hazlitt regains for readers the essential awe-inspiring forgotten truth about being able
“To catch four balls in succession in less than a second of time, and deliver them back so as to return with seeming consciousness to the hand again, to make them revolve round him at certain intervals, like the planets in their spheres, to make them chase one another like sparkles of fire, or shoot up like flowers or meteors”
“On the Pleasure of Hating”
Although it is most assuredly the topic, the actual phrase “the pleasure of hating” appears just one single time in the body of the essay after which the title was derived. So, what has Hazlitt to say specifically about this particular collision of paradoxical emotions? The pleasure of hating, he writes,
“like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others.”
"On Gusto"
“Gusto” is one of Hazlitt’s favorite words to describe something ambiguously yet with a precision of meaning peculiar to those who read everything he wrote. His definition of strangely flexible and elastic yet meticulously applied metaphor may not sound like anything one associated with advertising beer, but there you go:
“Gusto…is power or passion defining any object…it is in giving this truth of character from the truth of feeling, whether in the highest or the lowest degree, but always in the highest degree of which the subject is capable, that gusto consists.”
