Influence
Blair wrote in a time when print culture was flourishing and traditional rhetoric was falling out of favour. By focusing on issues of cultivation and upward mobility, Blair overshadowed the prevailing opinions of rhetoric and capitalized on the 18th century belief in the potential to rise above one's station. At this time, new money industrialists and merchants caused the middle class to rise and the English empire to grow. Blair's optimistic view that upward mobility could be affected by an understanding of eloquence and refined literature fit perfectly with the mentality of the time. In particular, the ideas presented in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres were adapted in many prestigious institutions of learning and served as the guide on composition for many years. Lectures were predominantly popular in the United States, with colleges such as Yale and Harvard implementing Blair's theories.
While Blair enjoyed great success in the better part of the 19th century, this success was not maintained throughout the following century. After the authenticity of the Ossian poems was disproved, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian caused a decline in Blair's credibility. Sermons was criticized for its sentimentality and lack of doctrinal definiteness and it failed to adapt to changing tastes. Lectures too did not maintain its popularity as theorists such as Whatley and Spencer, drawing on Blair's theories, dominated the domain of composition theory. Though the status of Blair's theories declined in the 19th century, his role as the first great theorist of written discourse cannot be denied. Blair's influence on decades of academics and theorists has ultimately affected the compositional theory of today.
An excellent portrait of Blair's Spanish translator, José Luis Munárriz, painted in 1815 by Goya, hangs in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. Munárriz holds one of Blair's books in his hands.
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Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influence which flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (17921822)