Literature and Words

Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me, From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.

Sweet Swan of Avon!

Be thou the tenth Muse.

Where more is meant than meets the ear.

And torture one poor word ten thousand ways.

And mighty poets in their misery dead.

For I bless God in the libraries of the learned and for all the booksellers in the world.

’Tis pleasant, sure, to see one’s name in print; A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in ’t.

Nature fits all her children with something to do, He who would write and can’t write, can surely review.

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.

Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. “And give up verse, my boy, There’s nothing in it.”

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

There’s glory for you!

Words strain,

The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism, are all very good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism.

You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.

Semper ad eventum festinat et in medias res Non secus ac notas auditorem rapit.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

He [the poet] must write as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind.

Grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice lis est.