Poets From England

"In night when colours all to black are cast, Distinction lost, or gone down with the light; The eye — a watch to inward senses placed, Not seeing, yet still having power of sight — Gives vain alarums to the inward sense."

"Three things there be in man's opinion dear, Fame, many friends, and fortune's dignities: False visions all, which in our sense appear, To sanctify desire's idolatry."

"Heigh, ho, fair Rosalynde!"

"Her neck is like a stately tower, Where Love himself imprison'd lies"

"With orient pearl, with ruby red, With marble white, with sapphire blue, Her body every way is fed, Yet soft in touch, and sweet in view:"

"As the birds do love the spring, Or the bees their careful king"

"I do love thee as my lambs Are belovėd of their dams"

"Diaphenia like the daffadowndilly"

"Hard-hearted minds relent and rigor's tears abound, And envy strangely rues his end, in whom no fault was found. Knowledge her light hath lost, valor hath slain her knight, Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight."

"I care not for these ladies, That must be wooed and prayed; Give me kind Amaryllis, The wanton country maid. Nature art disdaineth; Her beauty is her own."

"Ay, 'tis thus. Evil us hath in bond; By Thy grace guilt efface and respond "Forgiven!""

"O forgive! Thy sons live from Thee reft; Praised for grace, Turn thy face to those left, "Forgiven!""

"Plead, Sleep, my cause, and make her soft like thee, That she in peace may wake and pity me."

"Now rime, the son of rage, which art no kin to skill, And endless grief, which deads my life, yet knows not how to kill, Go seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find, Salute the stones that keep the bones that held so good a mind."

"Shall I come, sweet Love, to thee, When the ev'ning beams are set?"

"If Nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good. We that are bound by vows and by promotion, With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites, To teach belief in good and still devotion, To preach of heaven's wonders and delights — Yet, when each of us in his own heart looks, He finds the God there far unlike his books."

"The man whose silent days In harmless joys are spent, Whom hopes cannot delude, Nor sorrow discontent:That man needs neither towers Nor armour for defence, Nor secret vaults to fly From thunder's violence."

"Oh wearisome Condition of Humanity! Born under one law, to another bound: Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity, Created sick, commanded to be sound: What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws? Passion and reason, self-division cause. Is it the mark, or Majesty of Power To make offences that it may forgive?"

"There is a garden in her face Where roses and white lilies blow; A heavenly paradise is that place, Wherein all pleasant fruits do grow; There cherries grow that none may buy, Till Cherry-Ripe themselves do cry."

"Love is no true-made looking-glass Which perfect yields the shape we bring; It ugly shows us all that was, And flatters every future thing."

"Humanism, it seems, is almost impossible in America where material progress is part of the national romance whereas in Europe such progress is relished because it feels nice."

"It takes a certain amount of sass to speak up for prose that's rich, succulent and full of novelty. Purple is immoral, undemocratic and insincere; at best artsy, at worst the exterminating angel of depravity."

"I consider the whole Bloomsbury group—excepting only J. M. Keynes—to be the most overrated literary phenomenon of our times. Above all, Lytton Strachey: Strachey who has recently been accorded a two-volume biography, and whose only achievement was to trivialize history, to empty it of its real content and meaning, in order to raise a few complacent titters from the radical chic of his time."

"Pass a person through your mind, with all the documents, and see what comes out. That seems to be your method. Also, choose them, in the first place, because you dislike them."

"To mark a man's faults and failings was, for Johnson, to indicate where he had diverged from his true relation to God; for Strachey it was an agreeable intellectual pastime, which flattered his sense of superiority both to his subject and to the illusion-ridden mob."

"I've been reading Eminent Victorians... It seems to me downright wicked in its heart."

"His style is perfect joy, and it is only when one has come across a fairer and kindlier handling of one of his victims that one is resentful of his tittering."

"Whether or not its immediate success may be ascribed the post-war disillusionment with formerly accepted values and institutions, Eminent Victorians rapidly and solidly established itself as a biographical classic. Rarely, if ever, had psychological penetration, a talent for dramatic depiction of character, and a brilliant style been employed together to better effect. In the space of two hundred pages, by what Asquith called his "subtle and suggestive art," Strachey succeeded in re-absorbing English biography into the realm of literature. Not that the chorus of acclaim was unanimous or wholehearted. Almost everyone, then and now, was and is willing to grant Strachey stylistic excellence. But in the forty years since the first appearance of Eminent Victorians, the book has been under more or less continuous and vehement attack; and has, in turn, been no less vigorously defended."

"In a recently published volume—the most trenchant and brilliant series of biographical and historical studies which I have read for a long time—Mr. Lytton Strachey, under the modest title 'Eminent Victorians', has put on his canvas four figures (as unlike one another as any four people could be), Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, and General Gordon. None of the four can be said to have contributed much of permanent importance to the literature or art or science of their time; but each of them, in his or her day, was a prominent and potent personality; and perhaps one may be allowed to say that they are in less danger than ever of being forgotten, now that they have been re-created for the English readers of the future (not in a spirit of blind hero-worship) by Mr. Strachey's subtle and suggestive art."

"I would not have his books in my house."

"Felt the virtues of the Victorian times so condemned by Mr Strachey. The simple honesties can always be made a butt by the impish unrealiabilites."

"One observed a number of discordant features – a feminine sensibility, a delight in the absurd, a taste for exaggeration and melodrama, a very mature judgement and then some lack of human substance, some hereditary thinness in the blood that at times gave people who met him an odd feeling in the spine. He seemed almost indecently lacking in ordinariness."

"The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art."

"The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. … With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one."

"It is not [the biographer's] business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them...dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior motives."

"Madame, I am the civilization they are fighting for."

"If this is dying, then I don't think much of it."

"I remember how those who had appreciated only the wittily destructive portions of Eminent Victorians rubbed their hands in delighted anticipation of Queen Victoria. Now, the cynical Mr. Strachey would fairly let himself go, with the real Aunt Sally for his target. Mr. Strachey did nothing of the kind. If ever a great character was handled tenderly, with an insight tempered by affection, it was the Queen Victoria of his biography. His beautiful final paragraph was but the culmination of an attitude he had steadily maintained. And it is surely not too much to say that he changed the mind not only of his contemporaries but of his seniors about the central figure of a great era."

"There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble." These words made me a writer. When I was in middle school, my mother brought home a used paperback copy of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast…Reading this at the age of 13, I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language. Fantasy is death by owls. It’s mourning through gesture. It’s music, incantation in half-light. An inverted heart."

"The host of specifically religious suggestions and images, in a story that until now has been devoid of such concern, suggests very strongly that Peake is here referring to the Christian religion as a debasing influence. Peake’s treatment of Gormenghast’s ritual shows that he dislikes any system of values imposed on the individual from outside, offering him nothing directly relevant for himself and encouraging him in whatever weakness he possesses. So, here, the Lamb can break down but not build; despite his worshipper’s praise, he does not really understand how to keep his creatures alive. Still the Lamb glories in his power. True, in changing men he has destroyed them, denying them freedom to develop for themselves; to the Lamb, however, that is incidental to his own gratification."

"For Peake, the weight of moral standards comes from their being part of a tradition, and any tradition lies outside the individual’s potential and needs. Thus adherence to a morality impedes development of the whole self and denies real maturity."

"[Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience."

"Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work … a classic of our age."

"Once there were islands all a-sprout with palms: and coral reefs and sands as white as milk. What is there now but a vast shambles of the heart? Filth, squalor, and a world of little men."

"Change and growth cannot be halted, time must run on. That is the whole moral of the three books."

"... Voltaire ... The great potentate of the eighteenth century has suffered cruelly indeed at the hands of posterity. Everyone, it is true, has heard of him; but who has read him? It is by his name that ye shall know him, and not by his works. With the exception of his letters, of Candide, of ', and a few other of his shorter pieces, the vast mass of his productions has been already consigned to oblivion."

"“There’s something else, Mr. Muzzlehatch.” “I’m sure there is. In fact there is everything else.”"

"“Let go of my arm, or I will scream for God.” “He never helped you. Have you forgotten?”"

"Pompous as only failures can be."

"His mind fell asleep. His wits fell awake. His cock trembled like a harp-string."