Abstract
What happens to poetry when it is reframed within a work of prose? This paper analyzes William Hazlitt's prose style, with particular attention to moments in which he reframes poetry by extracting it from the patterns of rhyme and meter and placing it within the rhythms of his essays. In doing so, Hazlitt stylistically challenged the boundaries of genre; simultaneously, the content of his essays defined prose as a hybrid form, built through a process of mining other texts for quotations. This paper also makes an argument for the crucial role material culture played in Hazlitt's writing style. It demonstrates how Hazlitt's participation in friendship albums and commonplace books informed what he called a “familiar style” of writing. Ultimately, this paper sheds light on understudied manuscripts and analyzes their role in shaping the Romantic-essay form.
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