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In his 1932 Norton lectures, reflecting on Johnson as poet-critic, that other poet-critic T. S. Eliot argued that “it is surely by unconscious irony that we speak of an ‘age of Johnson’ as we do of an ‘age of Dryden’ or an ‘age of Addison.’ Lonely in his life, Johnson seems to me still more lonely in his intellectual and moral existence.” A great mountain towering above foothills such as Gray and Collins, Johnson was “their superior as a poet, not in sensibility, not in metrical dexterity or aptness of phrase, but in a moral elevation just short of sublimity.” Yet, a third of the way into the twentieth century, the Harvard audience still had to be convinced that Johnson was superior to these “meditative-Miltonizing” poets of sensibility, as Eliot's admirer F. R. Leavis would call them in his influential Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936). Johnson, Eliot...