Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A really great poet is... the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now you courtly dames and knights, That study only strange delights,... Though you scorn the home-spun gray And revel in your rich array; Though your tongues dissemble deep And can your heads from danger keep: Yet for all your pomp and train, Securer lives the silly swain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A higher class, in the estimation and love of this city- building, market-going race of mankind, are the poets, who, from the inte...llectual kingdom, feed the thought and imagination with ideas and pictures which raise men out of the world of corn and money, and console them for the short-comings of the day, and the meanness of labor and traffic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The appalling power with which metaphors of sexual lust illuminate the nature of war, and vice versa, proves that they are based o...n millennia of human experience. The poets of all time have used these figures. To conquer and loot a country is to rape it: to violate a woman is to conquer her by force and plunder her of her treasure. The violence that attends sex when it is unmitigated by love, and the sexual excesses that have attended war and been its aftermath, are the psychological and historical demonstrations of the consanguinity of the two.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the proud joys of the man of letters--if that man of letters is an artist--is to feel within himself the power to immortali...ze at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here lies Jonson with the rest Of the poets; but the best.... Reader, would'st thou more have known? Ask his story, not this stone. That will speak what this can't tell Of his glory. So farewell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »