‘Hazlitt, the Living Poets, and Ephemerality’

William Hazlitt is associated as much with canonical as ephemeral forms of culture. This article places his consideration of a new category, 'the living poets', who hovered between canonical security and ephemerality. Hazlitt points to the creative vitality of an age, the late Romantic period, in which poets felt unusually conscious of their place in a living moment that would, some day, become literary history.