Category: Poetry
Whilst midway in his thirty-fifth year Lowell was appointed to deliver a course of lectures before the Institute founded by a relative, and bearing the family name. He was then known as the author of two volumes of poems besides the biting “Fable for Critics” and the tender “V...
Whilst midway in his thirty-fifth year Lowell was appointed to deliver a course of lectures before the Institute founded by a relative, and bearing the family name. He was then...
2. Part 2The true reception of whatever is poetical or imaginative presupposes a more exalted, or, at least, excited, condition of mind both in the poet and the reader. To take an exampl...
3. Part 3The truth is, that ideal personifications are commonly little better than pinchbeck substitutes for imagination. They are a refuge which unimaginative minds seek from their own...
4. Part 4The embassy of the proud Paynim somehow results in your being imprisoned for seven years, when it suddenly occurs to you that you might as well step out. So you pick up a magic...
5. Part 5It is always a piece of good fortune to be the earliest acknowledged poet of any country. We prize the first poems as we do snowdrops, not only for their own intrinsic beauty, b...
6. Part 6The popularity of such works shows the insatiable thirst of the human soul for something which at least tried to be beyond mere matter-of-fact. This thirst for the ideal transmu...
7. Part 7Dr. Johnson sneers at Milton for having come home from Italy because he could not stay abroad while his countrymen were struggling for their freedom, and then quietly settling d...
8. Part 8If we apply the definitions we have made to Butler’s poem, we shall find that it is not properly humorous at all; that the nearest approach to the humorous is burlesque. Irony i...
9. Part 9There was then a fierce democracy of words; no grades had then been established, and no favored ones advanced to the Upper House of Poetry. Men had a meaning, and so their words...
10. Part 10There seem to have been two distinct natures in him--Wordsworth the poet, and Wordsworth the man who used to talk about Wordsworth the poet. One played a kind of Baruch to the o...