Encountering Johnson during my freshman year of college was like mastering a foreign language. His baroque English, with its convoluted sentences and lofty vocabulary backed by an oversized ego, were so foreign to the flat Midwestern voice I’ve inherited or the accompanying weight of humility and piety.
I did wind up publishing an underground broadside series, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Rambler, in the aftermath, though it had a kind of Wind in the Willows countercurrent. Anyone remember mimeograph?
Later, at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, I actually had in my hands on original copies of The Rambler that Johnson produced twice a week beginning in 1750. Some of the issues before me had coffee stains. Or were they tea? There were also pencil markings in the margins.
His influence probably resulted in the complex compound sentences in my own work that likely limit my readership. Thanks, Literary Lion.
I should have also seen the way he created a role of outrageous author and played it to the hilt, far before the excesses of Romanticism swept European culture. Richard Wagner could have taken lessons from Johnson.
Jnana's Red Barn 