Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, ...and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilised people is poetical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When thou once Was beaten from Modena, where thou slew'st... Hirtius and Pasa, consuls, at thy heel Did famine follow, whom thou fought'st against, Thou daintily brought up, with patience more Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink The stale of horses and the gilded puddle Which beasts would cough at. Thy palate then did deign The roughest berry on the rudest hedge. Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets, The barks of trees thou browsed. On the Alps It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh, Which some did die to look on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxu...ry. But the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ossian reminds us of the most refined and rudest eras, of Homer, Pindar, Isaiah, and the American Indian. In his poetry, as in Hom...er's, only the simplest and most enduring features of humanity are seen, such essential parts of a man as Stonehenge exhibits of a temple; we see the circles of stone, and the upright shaft alone. The phenomena of life acquire almost an unreal and gigantic size seen through his mists. Like all older and grander poetry, it is distinguished by the few elements in the lives of its heroes. They stand on the heath, between the stars and the earth, shrunk to the bones and sinews. The earth is a boundless plain for their deeds. They lead such a simple, dry, and everlasting life, as hardly needs depart with the flesh, but is transmitted entire from age to age. There are but few objects to distract their sight, and their life is as unencumbered as the course of the stars they gaze at.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's a turgid welter of pornography (the rudest schoolboy kind) & unformed & unimportant drivel; & until the raw ingredients of a ...pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation & thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »