Posts Tagged ‘John Dryden’
Quote of the Day
I confess my chief endeavors are to delight the age in which I live. If the humor of this be for low comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force my genius to obey it, though with more reputation I could write in verse.
What is poetry like?
Poetry is like mining for radium. The output an ounce, the labor a year.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.
Your teacher says that poetry is like an exquisite and towering pagoda that appears at the snap of the fingers or like the twelve towers of the five cities of the immortals that ephemerally exist at the edge of heaven. I do not agree. To use a metaphor, poetry is like building a house out of tiles, glazed bricks, wood, and stone—he must put them all together, one by one, on solid ground.
Poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in solitude and in the times of solitude, as, for example, in earliest morning.
Poetry is like a panther: it delights the eye; but against any attempt to enslave it, it may wreak revenge.
Many a fair precept in poetry is like a seeming demonstration in the mathematics, very specious in the diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation.
Poetry is like math or chess or music—it requires a slightly freaky misshapen brain, and those kinds of brains don’t last.
Writing a poem is like getting a short-term contract from God. You get this one done and if you do a good job, then maybe another contract will come along.
Writing poetry is like writing history—talent, learning, and understanding in suitable proportion.
Poetry is like religion: sometimes the vision is immediate and almost frightening in its intensity; sometimes it is reached with difficulty, giving intimations only, and those confused and partial.
Writing a poem is like solving for X in an equation.
—Attributed to W.H. Auden by Robert Earl Hayden
Poetry is like being alive twice.
“The largest and most comprehensive soul…”
To begin then with Shakespeare. He was the man who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously but luckily: when he describes anything you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him…
Quote of the Day
What Virgil wrote in the vigor of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years: struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write.
—John Dryden, on his translation of the Aeneid
Alec Nevala-Lee 