Vulgar Greatness and Common Lords: The Rhetoric of Ambiguity and the Poets of the Nobility in Samuel Johnson's "Lives of the Poets"

Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets have since their appearance met with very differing opinions, from accusations of unfairness to praise for critical insight; yet, criticism has rarely considered these discrepancies of reading as an effect of the rhetorical construction of the text.The rhetoric of Johnson's Lives is always one of contradiction, but, through rhetorical close readings of seven minor lives, this study shows how such contradiction also results in ambiguity.The treated texts are those of seven noblemen: Rochester, Roscommon, Dorset, Halifax, Sheffield, Granville, and Lyttelton.Johnson's rhetoric sets out to contradict the "vulgar greatness" of their lives and their overrated poetical reputation, but his contradiction often ends by contradicting itself and ultimately reveals ambiguity.This rhetoric of ambiguity undermines what is commonly seen as Johnson's typical antithetical style and instead reveals different strategies through which Johnson attempts to convey a true depiction of the complexity and ambiguity of his all too human subjects, even if it means contradicting himself.Thus, Johnson uses his rhetoric of ambiguity strategically and sometimes not completely deliberately to reveal prejudices against the nobility, but also to contradict them, manifesting fundamental conflicts within his mind.may or may not have been born in Ireland (3: 189, 3: 65).Insofar as the reader agrees with Johnson that a biography should not only instruct informationally, but also morally -and concerning literature in matters of taste, -he or she may expect the biographer's discourse to fall under the rhetorical epideictic, which, in moral terms, decides on the goodness or badness of actions (Encyclopedia of Rhetoric; "honorable and disgraceful" in Aristotle's Rhetoric 1.3.6), and in literary terms, judges the quality of a performance.Ambiguity in epideictic discourse would therefore undermine its ability for moral instruction.Rhetorical persuasion further works through pathos, appeals to passion; in this case, through satiric laughter, to despise bad examples, and through admiration, to appreciate good examples; but Johnson also encourages sympathy for his subjects.Because of an often ambivalent and sometimes ambiguous stance in this regard, Johnson's rhetoric stirs his readers' passions, but not always in strategically straightforward rhetorical ways (as for example "poor Lyttelton," discussed in chapter 8).Finally, biographers themselves traditionally stay mainly hidden, apart from supporting their rhetorical ethos as trustworthy and knowing researchers, who, in case a fact truly is uncertain, give the impression that they left nothing undone to discover the truth.While this is a part of Johnson's strategies of ethos in the Lives, he also likes to openly include his opinions and his knowledge -as well as his lack thereof -and become a presence in the text.Critical analyses of the Lives tend to read them in one of three main ways that lead to specific problems of neglect.The first has the support of T.S. Eliot, who advises to read the Lives completely from beginning to end, but because of the sheer length, it is very difficult to notice all of Johnson's subtleties of irony and ambiguity, on which my work is based.The second way is to read a selection of the 'best' Lives, usually meaning the ones treating the major poets and the "Life of Savage," which is exemplified by Matthew Arnold's The Six Chief Lives From Johnson's "Lives of the Poets" and the Oxford World's Classics' The Lives of the Poets: A Selection; 6 consequently, as T. S. Eliot observed, "Few educated persons have read more than half a dozen of [the Lives] and of those half dozen, what is remembered is chiefly the passages with which one disagrees" ("Johnson as Critic and Poet" 184).This led and still leads to a neglect of the so-called 'minor lives,' about which there is a dearth of criticism.One feels that for many modern critics, even (or specifically) Johnsonians, the minor lives are a bit of an embarrassment: they do not include much biographical research nor the deeper criticism that more important works evoked; at best, they contain a few kernels of wisdom or otherwise memorable (or quotable) sentences that can be removed from their context, but they rarely

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