“O, that we could once see a good, innocent, truthful, schoolboy-like translation of a great author!”

Wishing for straightforward, unadorned fidelity rather than polished paraphrase · Essay, Remarks on Translation (1844)

• Honesty
• Simplicity
• Translation

“A peculiar mode of expressing my idea of public taste.”

Explaining the farthing price of his epic as a deliberate commentary on public indifference to poetry · Letter to Leigh Hunt (1843), on pricing Orion at one farthing

• Poetry
• Public Opinion
• Taste

“The present publication does not result from an antiquarian feeling about Chaucer as the Father of English Poetry, highly interesting as he must always be in that character alone; but from the extraordinary fact, to which there is no parallel in the history of the literature of nations, that although he is one of the great poets for all time, his works are comparatively unknown to the world.”

Explaining the motive for modernising Chaucer as making a timeless poet accessible · Introduction to Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Modernised (1841)

• Accessibility
• Chaucer
• Literature