A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful pla...ce of composition, the small single unluxurious "retreat" of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to... tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fash...ion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former--while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he thinks fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfa...re; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,--both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his WIT--as his RESISTANCE.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This unlettered man's speaking and writing are standard English. Some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and Americanisms before,... he has made standard American; such as "It will pay." It suggests that the one great rule of composition--and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this--is, to speak the truth. This first, this second, this third; pebbles in your mouth or not. This demands earnestness and manhood chiefly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but th...ey are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enor...mous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the ...world, no species of composition has been so much decried.... "And what are you reading, Miss--?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »