I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the ...pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have trailed the pike of composition work and directed the small-sword play of debate. I have carried the musket on the long his...torical trail from Beowulf to Browning, and now, after many years of happy duty in the pleasant Elizabethan country, I am still serving, with such effect as may be, the big guns of Shakespeare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river?... Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nay, if there's room for poets in this world A little overgrown (I think there is),... Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne's,--this live, throbbing age. That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, Than Roland with his knights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good neighbour, even in this, Is fatal sometimes, cuts your morning up... To mince-meat of the very smallest talk, Then helps to sugar her bohea at night With your reputation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The world's male chivalry has perished out, But women are knights-errant to the last;... And, if Cervantes had been greater still, He had made his Don a Donna.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »