"The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages. How does Carlyle justify his own statement upon discussing Shakespeare as Hero?
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Answer:
"The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages. How does Carlyle justify his own statement upon discussing Shakespeare as Hero?
Answer:
Thomas Carlyle’s conception of history was a reaction against two types of history-writing which oppressed his flammingly subjective and affirmative soul; the interpretative but skeptical histories of Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson, and the objective fact-catalogues of his time which he scornfully labeled “Dryasdust.” To Carlyle neither method recognized the presence of human personality, of men who formed rather than were formed by the forces of their world. Carlyle’s writing of history became a method of attacking mechanistic theories of the universe, an assertion of the Romantic doctrine of the importance of individual consciousness and history. Also Carlyle believed firmly in the significance of his own subjective experience, and by extension, that biography and auto-biography were the great interests of mankind. Thus he was fitted to be the prophet of the “great-man” theory to his time. Yet he also espoused order and strength in government as the expression of the “nationhood” of a people. A generation nursed by the Romantic tradition, but becoming increasingly nationalistic and concerned with social issues, was to find in thetheir greatest historians, and in his hero the expression of their combined idealism and desires.