Homer sweeps us away by the irresistible movement of lines through a whole passage to a splendid climax. What counts is the single...ness of his effect, the unbroken maintenance of a heroic or tragic mood, the concentration on some action vividly imagined and clearly portrayed without irrelevance or second thoughts or even those hints that lure into bypaths of fancy and suggest that there is more in the words than is obvious at first sight. But in Virgil, great though the paragraphs are, compelling though the climax is when it is reached, we are more concerned with the details, with each small effect and each deftly placed word, than with the whole. We linger over the richness of single phrases, over the "pathetic half-lines," over the precision or potency with which a word illuminates a sentence or a happy sequence of sounds imparts an inexplicable charm to something that might otherwise have been trivial. Of course, Homer has his magical phrases and Virgil his bold effects, but the distinction stands. It is a matter of composition, of art, and it marks the real difference between the two kinds of epic, which are not so much "authentic" and "literary" as oral and written.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Beneath the azure current floweth; Above, the golden sunlight glows.... Rebellious, the storm it wooeth, As if the storms could give repose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I have been the source of pain, O God; If to the weak I have refused my strength;... If, in rebellion, I have strayed away; Forgive me, God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Tis time, my friend, 'tis time! For rest the heart is aching;... Days follow days in flight, and every day is taking Fragments of being, while together you and I Make plans to live. Look, all is dust, and we shall die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess... a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How the devil am I to prove to my counsel that I don't know my murderous impulses through C.G. Jung, jealousy through Marcel Prous...t, Spain through Hemingway ... It's true, you need never have read these authorities, you can absorb them through your friends, who also live all their experiences second-hand. What an age!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Taking men into the union is just the kindergarten of their education and every force is against their further education. Men who ...live up those lonely creeks have only the mine owners' Y.M.C.As, the mine owners' preachers and teachers, the mine owners' doctors and newspapers to look to for their ideas. So they don't get many.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y....M.C.A.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian e...ndeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »