In his famous essay “On Poetry in General,” Hazlitt, the artist and literary critic, summed up what he saw as the disenchanting impact of the modern world on the state of humanity, an impact he seemed to see as tragically inevitable. Above all, it engendered a spirit alien to that of poetry: It is not only the progress of mechanical knowledge, but the necessary advances of civilization that are unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less awe of the preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look with more indifference, upon the regular routine of this.11
