Essays on Wit No. 2

This audio brings together a fascinating series of early modern essays that wrestle with the slippery notion of wit. Beginning with pieces by Richard Flecknoe, Joseph Warton, and a 1732 essay from the Weekly Register, the collection tracks how writers of the Augustan age tried to pin down what makes a mind quick, inventive, and amusing. A scholarly introduction by Edward N. Hooker frames the debate, showing how wit was seen as both a mental agility and a playful misdirection.

Listeners will hear the contrasting definitions offered by thinkers such as Hobbes, who linked wit to imagination and the ability to draw surprising connections, and his critics who warned that such cleverness could skirt truth. The essays also explore how poets balanced judgment with fancy, letting wit decorate language while still serving reason. By the end of the first act, the series reveals why the period’s great poets prized wit even as they debated its proper limits.