SOURCE: Introduction to William Hazlitt, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1986, pp. 1-13.

In the following introduction to a collection of critical essays on Hazlitt, Bloom contends that Hazlitt 's "poetics of power" chronicles the difficult relationship between imagination and experience, oneself and others.

I

David Bromwich, Hazlitt's best critic, shrewdly says of Hazlitt's key word gusto that it "accords nicely with the belief that taste adds to our nature instead of correcting it." I take it that Hazlitt's gusto is an aesthetic displacement of the Dissenting Protestant version of grace, which corrects our nature without abolishing it. The son of a radical Dissenting Minister, Hazlitt himself was always a Jacobin with a faith in Napoleon as the true heir of the Revolution. Unswerving in his politics, Hazlitt also remained an unreconstructed early Wordsworthian, unlike Wordsworth himself, a difference that Hazlitt bitterly kept in mind, as here...