Thomas Carlyle!

Our library has a lovely version of his autobiography and I have to remind myself what a chore reading him in college was.

he did go on so. but in small bites he's tops! a poet at heart.

The Pride of Ecclefechan!

So this guy Campbell is still amazed by Sartor Resartus and its creator, though also writes as a man of his own time (having taken readers through many other takes, at different stages of Caryle's very long life, and since):

From the perspective of the late-twentieth century Carlyle can be seen without the outrage that greeted his originality. His ideas are undoubtedly oversimplified, his tolerance levels for others' ideas far too low. His vivid style can be abused, particularly in indiscriminate attack. His stubborn iteration of one point can be dangerous when that point is a weak or indefensible one.

Against these weaknesses, Carlyle has survived the scrutiny of the years as an original critic of his time and as a skillful, though uneven, writer/stylist who understood the needs of a generation. After his death his reputation suffered a remarkable eclipse. Happily, he has been rehabilitated as an important representative Victorian, and, as the discovery of his work and above all his correspondence continues, so too does the rehabilitation of his reputation. We have passed beyond the need to venerate him as sage, of Chelsea or of Ecclefechan. Rather we see him as an emblem of the complexity, contradiction, and sometimes absurdity of the era. As the Victorian Age was untidy and contradictory, so were the original minds which responded to its needs and shaped their writing to its complex demands. In his contradictions Carlyle challenges us to a new formulation by which to judge his success, and he leaves behind an achievement sufficiently large and sufficiently diverse, as to ensure that the process of evaluation will be a long and critically challenging one.
— Ian Campbell, University of Edinburgh
from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/thomas-carlyle, appropriately enough, since TC does seem like his own kind of poet, in terms of manipulation of and sometimes by language, insight, intuition, other.

'Thinkers and unthinkers, by the million, are spontaneously at their post, doing what is in them.' = new description of some board, surely.

If you read Heroes and Hero Worship slowly and thoughtfully, rather than ardently, swept along by the prose, you'll discover where Carlyle's shortcomings lie. He communicates his enthusiasms and his disdains with such vigor and passion that it is easy to turn off your critical faculties, but he is a first cousin to Nietzsche and must not be taken without some grains of salt.

Carlyle, if not the greatest prose master of our age, by virtue of his original genius and mass of stroke, is the literary dictator of Victorian prose. And, though we all know how wantonly he often misused his mighty gift, though no one now would venture to imitate him even at a distance, and though Matthew Arnold was ever taking up his parable -- "Flee Carlylese as the very Devil!" -- we are all sliding into Carlylese unconsciously from time to time, and even "culture" itself fell into the trap in the very act of warning others.

-- Frederic Harrison (1893)

His prose style is a wild crash of waves that's pretty gnarly whenever I manage to shoot the curl, but one of him was probably enough for the world.

as a stylist he's the English Melville.

Scottish.

better!

lol

You can take the boy out of Ecclefechan...