Samuel Rogers
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Samuel Rogers (30 July 1763 – 18 December 1855) was an English poet, during his lifetime one of the most celebrated, although his fame has long since been eclipsed by his Romantic colleagues and friends Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron. His recollections of these and other friends such as Charles James Fox are key sources for information about London artistic and literary life, with which he was intimate, and which he used his wealth to support. He made his money as a banker and was also a discriminating art collector.
He is the author of The Pleasures of Memory (1792) – regarded by some as the last embodiment of the poetic diction of the 18th century. The theory of elevating and refining familiar themes by abstract treatment and lofty imagery is taken to extremes. In this art of "raising a subject", as the 18th century phrase was, the Pleasures of Memory is much more perfect than Thomas Campbell's [Pleasures of Hope]], published a few years later in imitation. Byron said of it, "There is not a vulgar line in the poem."
