If only the phantom would stop reappearing! Business, if you wanted to know, was punk at the opera.... The heroine no longer appeared in Faust. The crowds strolled sadly away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the wings the tenor hungers For the heroine's convulsive kiss, and Faust... Moves forward, no longer young, reappearing And reappearing for the last time. The opera Faust would no longer need its phantom. On the bare, sunlit stage the hungers could begin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blake and Goethe were individualists par excellence, uncompromisingly protective of their single vision. In both Faust Part II and... The Four Zoas, emphasis on the universality of the poet's message contrasts with the resistant texture of a compressed style and the striking complexity of the mythological machinery. Blake likes to emphasize that he is not writing for the simple-minded; Goethe takes a teasing pleasure in keeping philologists busy. Faust and The Four Zoas are dramatic epics of Humanity, but embodied in a mythic language whose uniqueness and quirkiness are jealously guarded. Blake never published The Four Zoas, though it culminates his early prophecies and provides the indispensable key to the later ones. And Goethe refused to allow Faust Part II to be printed in its entirety until after his death. Both poets postponed the public's discovery of their central works; secrecy was enforced as long as it could be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to rea...d Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust.... You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will.... Each hour is precious.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce great ...poetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've studied now Philosophy And Jurisprudence, Medicine--... And even, alas! Theology-- From end to end with labor keen; And here, poor fool! with all my lore I stand, no wiser than before.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »