19th-century Critic Quotes

Ezra Pound
John Ruskin
Matthew Arnold
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Georg Brandes
Sergei Diaghilev
Vissarion Belinsky

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.

We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to 'the needs of society', or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.

Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
When I was but thirteen or so
I went into a golden land,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Took me by the hand.

A song to the oak, the brave old oak,
Who hath ruled in the greenwood long!

On me, on me
Time and change can heap no more!
The painful past with blighting grief
Hath left my heart a withered leaf.
Time and change can do no more.

There once was an old man of Lyme
Who married three wives at a time,
When asked 'Why a third?'
He replied, 'One's absurd!
And bigamy, Sir, is a crime!'

William Cosmo Monkhouse
William Cosmo Monkhouse
There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.

If I had a device, it would be the true, the true only, leaving the beautiful and the good to settle matters afterwards as best they could.

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
When love first dawns on the mind, the faintest superficial contact flashes along the nerves as a thrill of delicious emotion.

Science is the great cleanser of the human thinking; it makes impossible any religion but the highest.

In holy music's golden speech Remotest notes to notes respond: Each octave is a world; yet each Vibrates to worlds beyond its own.

Without the striving for infinity there is no life, no development, and no progress.

Vissarion Belinsky
Vissarion Belinsky
Let there be no mincing of comparisons in this assertion. Not Turner, not Monet, painted so directly blinding shafts of sunlight as has this Spaniard.

I dwell no more in Arcady, But when the sky is blue with May, And birds are blithe and winds are free, I know what message is for me, For I have been in Arcady.

Louise Chandler Moulton
Louise Chandler Moulton
Flatulency today consists in saying simply in several different ways the same thing over and over again.

The secret of pleasure in life, as distinct from its great triumphs of transcendent joy, is to live in a series of small, legitimate successes. By legitimate I mean such as are not accompanied by self-condemnation.

No writer or speaker who ignores the roots of Latin derivatives is secure from egregious error.

Astound me! I'll wait for you to astound me.

Sergei Diaghilev
Sergei Diaghilev
At about six in the morning of July 3, 1860, while I was watering my petunias, and thinking of nothing in particular, I perceived coming towards me, a tall, beardless, fair-haired young fellow, wearing a German cap and gold-rimmed spectacles.

To ask advice is in nine cases out of ten to tout for flattery.

John Churton Collins
John Churton Collins
His thoughts were a loose skein of threads,
And tangled emotions, vague and dim;
And sacrificing what he loved
He lost the dearest part of him

William Braithwaite
William Braithwaite
In trying to train the mind to judge of works of architecture, one can never be too patient.

If the soup had been as warm as the wine;
if the wine had been as old as the turkey;
and if the turkey had had a breast like the maid,
it would have been a swell dinner.

Duncan Hines
Duncan Hines
Only the heel
Of splendid steel
Shall stand secure on sliding fate,
When golden navies weep their freight.

Arthur Quiller-Couch
Arthur Quiller-Couch
What Nature has writ with her lusty wit Is worded so wisely and kindly That whoever has dipped in her manuscript Must up and follow her blindly.

William Ernest Henley
William Ernest Henley