Literature and Words

Exercise your words. Try them out in new relationships.

Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne, Entuned in hir nose ful semely; And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe For Frenssh of Parys was to hir unknowe.

This may wel be rym dogerel.

Or call up him that left half told The story of Cambuscan bold.

Those oft are stratagems which errors seem, Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.

A man must serve his time to every trade Save censure—critics all are ready-made.

[Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge:] I wish he would explain his explanation.

Scorn not the sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honors; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

Of light is poesy; ’tis the supreme of power; ’Tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm.

O for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed That my own soul has to itself decreed.

Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man.

Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry.

What the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion.

The plum survives its poems.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great

The main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavours, in all branches of knowledge—theology, philosophy, history, art, science—to see the object as in itself it really is.

Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!

I and the public know

Other voices, other rooms.

’Tis sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;