On Samuel Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes

hello and welcome on this day September 7th 1709 the great poet essayist and literary critic Samuel Johnson was born so I thought today I would just introduce you to the vanity of human wishes especially if you haven't read it before you're really in for a treat it's a bit of a long poem so I won't read the whole thing but I just want to highlight some of the the beautiful passages here and just tell you a little bit about this poem the whole title is called the vanity of human Wishes the tenth satire of juvenile imitated now Johnson was writing in the 18th century around the time around the height of the neoclassical period I think the height was in the early 18th century so he's writing a little bit after that but the neoclassical mode is still in full force and the thing you have to understand about poets in England in the 18th century is that they were not the poets we often think about when you think about poets today you think of the Moody withdrawn artists stick types that are writing away in some attic or Garrett somewhere but the 18th century poet was more of a public figure he or she was a social critic their exercises in poetry wasn't so much about their internal feelings and how they processed these meditations they were more examples of public rhetoric so when a poet in the 18th century would withdraw privately to sit down and write they were imagining themselves actually standing up publicly to speak and so that's something to keep in mind with these satires and with a lot of neoclassical poetry there are some exceptions and Thomas Gray is one of them and once you get into the later part of the 18th century you have that romantic binge where poetry begins to be more withdrawn and dealing with feelings but in the neoclassical age feelings were held suspect largely because of how passion and religious fervor in the 17th century led to the execution of the king so their their politics involved in the subject matter and the mode of writing during this time but Samuel Johnson when he's writing this poem he's writing a satire about humankind and so a satire will sometimes think satires are are just poets making fun of each other or being ...