5 ideas
A person's temperament, style and blind spots can be read as a concentrated expression of the intellectual forces of their time rather than as purely private traits. Sketching a thinker's manner of talking, writing and failing reveals the currents of an age more vividly than an abstract history of ideas.
Wordsworth's poetry carries the egalitarian impulse of the French Revolution into literature. It rejects ornament, rank and inherited poetic subjects and grants dignity to humble people, plain speech and ordinary feeling. The poet's own mind and sensations then replace traditional grandeur as the source of significance, so democratic levelling and inward egotism arrive together.
Coleridge had immense range and brilliance, but he moved restlessly across metaphysics, theology, poetry and politics and finished almost nothing. His gifts poured into dazzling conversation instead of sustained work. Hazlitt presents him as the emblem of an age that multiplies ideas and speculation faster than it can convert them into achievement.
Bentham reasons with rigorous consistency from the single principle of utility. Because he ignores habit, imagination and passion, his system is logically complete but blind to how people actually live.
Scott's genius works by effacing himself and reviving the past, its manners, people and landscapes, with generous objectivity. The same backward gaze inclines him to political reaction. Byron works the opposite way, projecting his own proud, restless ego onto every subject, so his intensity and his narrowness come from the same source.