Samuel Johnson's literary criticism

Johnson's literature, especially his Lives of the Poets series, is marked by various opinions on what would make a poetic work excellent.

His greatest complaint was the overuse of obscure allusion found in works like Milton's Lycidas, and he preferred poetry that could be easily read.

Although revolutionary and more accurate as a biographer, Johnson had to struggle with his beliefs against a society that was unwilling to hear of details that may be viewed as tarnishing a reputation.

[6] In Rambler 60, Johnson put forth why he thought society could not be comfortable with hearing the negative truth of individuals that they admire:[7] All joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others is produced by an act of imagination that realizes the event, however fictitious, or approximates it, however remote, by placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate, so that we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever motions would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves... Our passions are therefore more strongly moved, in proportion as we can more readily adopt the pains or pleasure proposed to our minds, by recognizing them as once our own.Also, Johnson did not feel that biography should be limited to the most important people, but felt that the lives of lesser individuals could be deemed the most significant.

[13] Later critics would attempt to create theories to analyse the aesthetics of literature, but Johnson was not a theorist and he used his ideas only for the practical purpose to better read the works.

[14] When it came to Shakespeare's plays, Johnson emphasised the role of a reader in understanding language when he wrote, "If Shakespeare has difficulties above other writers, it is to be imputed to the nature of his work, which required the use of common colloquial language, and consequently admitted many phrases allusive, elliptical, and proverbial, such as we speak and hear every hour without observing them".

[16] Besides direct literary criticism, Johnson emphasised the need to establish a text that accurately reflects what an author wrote.