Samuel Johnson's
Lives of the Poets 

Establishing the centrality of a dialectical method in the Lives of the Poets,
this study links the rise of biography--as well as Johnson's interest in the form
--to the shift in epistemology brought about by empiricism. In the new patterns
of thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, biography--the estimation
of a life through the sifting of historical evidence -- was the most philo-
sophical of endeavors, and Johnson its greatest practitioner.

"The most rewarding study of of the Lives of the Poets that I have seen to date."

--Mark Temmer, The Year's Work in English Studies 69 (1988): 364.

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