Poets From England

"Vox Populi, Vox Dei is the very Basis, and ground Work, on which all the Super structure of this Pamphlet is rais'd; if therefore we shall prove that, the Voice of the People is the Cry of Hell, leading to Idolatry, Rebellion, Murder, and all the Wickedness the Devil can suggest, it will follow that all the Notions grounded, upon the false Principle of its being the Voice of God, must fall to the Ground, and that the Broacher of them has built upon Sand, and is himself guilty of promoting Irreligion, Profaneness, Sedition, Slaughter, and Confusion."

"[T]here are...powerful Motives to make the Whigs open their Arms to embrace all Strangers: One to strengthen their Party. For I scarce ever knew a Foreigner settled in England, whether of Dutch, German, French, Italian or Turkish Growth, but became a Whig in a little time after mixing with us: An Argument that all the World know our Constitution better than we; or that as Strangers have less Concern for us, they strike in with those who are the least affected to England."

"Francis Atterbury, the ablest controversialist in the High Church party."

"A poem, of whatever length, should start vividly, so as to wind up the ear and set the mind ticking."

"I thought no one ever could paint a woman's eyes like Rossetti. There was a softness, a delicacy, a life, a soul in them, never seen elsewhere, but in living beings, and that how rarely!"

"I remember well the time when no gentleman was supposed to smoke; the habit was fit only for the vulgarian."

"The more a writer deviates from simplicity, the less sincere he appears."

"It is my purpose in writing these Memoirs to adhere rigidly to truth, at least in its essence. Should I succeed in this, my work would be a very remarkable one, almost unique."

"In those days, and long after, an English clergyman dressed like a gentleman; he now wears a black livery, and he looks like a bishop's footman, in mourning, with his master, for some dead archbishop."

"Doth Nature know our dream, or is the mind A passing breath her beauty leaves behind?"

"There is something very dry in family history, because no one cares for other people's relations."

"... Mr. Nussey, the king's apothecary, ... whom I knew very intimately later in life, told me that the king confided to him all his secrets, and the knowledge, if written down, would set all England in a blaze. He was with the royal patient to the last, the king never letting go of his hand for twenty-four hours, which gave him an agony of cramp all but insupportable."

"Dr. Thomas Young, the illustrious inventor of the Undulatory Theory of Light, was then a physician at St. George's. I used to go round the wards with him. He was thought to be very undecided in his opinions of a case; the fact is, medicine is so uncertain a science, it was not good enough for such an intellect as his to work on."

"Nothing that has been and has died out, will be revived. The skeleton, an osseous Apollo, will remain, and that is all."

"It may be boasted that free-trade in physic came before free-trade in corn, and from that time medical science began to flourish in this country."

"If one looks back, one perceives that the majority of our poetic authors owed their success to patrons who made their works a fashion. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, had noble or royal patrons; Milton there was no one to patronize, whence the market value of "Paradise Lost" rose only to ten pounds. Dryden belonged to the upper class, so he had a patron in himself; Pope was made a fashion through patronization: Bolingbroke alone would have sufficed to lift him up into fame."

"I've watched thee, Scarab! Yea, an hour in vain ⁠I've watched thee, slowly toiling up the hill, ⁠Pushing thy lump of mud before thee still With patience infinite and stubborn strain. Strive as thou mayest, spare neither time nor pain. To screen thy burden from all chance of ill; Push, push, with all a beetle's force of will, Thy ball, alas! rolls ever down again. Toil without end! And why? That after thee Dim hosts of groping Scarabs too shall climb This self-same height? Accursed progeny Of Sisyphus, what antenatal crime Has doomed us too to roll incessantly ⁠Life's Stone, recoiling from the Alps of time?"

"There was intoxication in the air; The wind, keen blowing from across the seas, O'er leagues of new-ploughed land and heathery leas, Smelt of wild gorse whose gold flamed everywhere. And undertone of song pulsed far and near, The soaring larks filled heaven with ecstasies, And, like a living clock among the trees, The shouting cuckoo struck the time of year. For now the Sun had found the earth once more, And woke the Sleeping Beauty with a kiss; Who thrilled with light of love in every pore, Opened her flower-blue eyes, and looked in his. Then all things felt life fluttering at their core— The world shook mystical in lambent bliss."

"Poetry has always been at the margins, and I think that because of its sidelining, this has been a part of its appeal…"

"Spoken Word poetry is an art form that fits me well because it enables me to bring all the layers of who I am into one space — A reader, writer, and performer…"

"I can say poetry has certainly sharpened my senses and keeps me open to wonder about alternative realities, to be overly curious rather than overly ideological, it can be read as just a reminder that we have more senses than we have the words for, so perhaps we ought to revel in that if we are to truly live our lives in the light?"

"I try to root the language of my poetry in kindness, forgiveness, compassion and curiosity, that is the way I want to live, but of course that’s not to say anger and resentment and envy and other difficult emotions don’t make a noise in my work…"

"I wanted to put presence into absence. I was very frustrated that black British women weren't visible in literature. I whittled it down to 12 characters – I wanted them to span from a teenager to someone in their 90s, and see their trajectory from birth, though not linear. There are many ways in which otherness can be interpreted in the novel – the women are othered in so many ways and sometimes by each other. I wanted it to be identified as a novel about women as well."

"I have a term I came up with called fusion fiction – that's what it felt like, with the absence of full stops, the long sentences. The form is very free-flowing and it allowed me to be inside the characters' heads and go all over the place – the past, the present. For me, there's always a level of experimentation – I'm not happy writing what we might call traditional novels."

"With all of my books I'm interested in where people come from in relation to who they are."

"I'm not interested in any stereotypes whatsoever."

"When you're a slave you dream / of either owning slaves or freeing them."

"We are not learning the occult alphabet; most of us have done all that before we came here. I used to read for about three or four hours a day before I met M.H.-not as a duty, but because I liked it. When you’ve extracted all the knowledge you can out of books, then the Master appears."

"If some people are not disposed to believe that morals change with the times, then let them look into the book held most sacred by all the peoples of the West, and read how at one time the idea of Justice was ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ Or look further back still and read of King Solomon, said to be the wisest- which surely also implies the most moral - man who ever lived."

"The supermoralist realizes that when he has acquired a virtue or a faculty, be it truthfulness or ecstatic trance- what matter-then is the time to hide it or indulge in it sparingly, or both, as circumstances dictate."

"How would the bulk of fastidious Americans with their legislation against this, that and the other, regard a man who had seven hundred wives and two hundred concubines? Would they consider him the wisest man on this whole continent? I should like to know how even he could find the time to cultivate wisdom, under the stress of such extensive erotic obligations."

"If we look at the mental bodies of very conventional people we find their outlines hard and rigid, and the bodies themselves small and as it were under - nourished."

"From what seeds does this weed of conventionality grow? From mental laziness, fear- of what others will think; vanity- or the capacity to be hurt by what they will say; and superstition- or the false notion that what the majority think must be right."

"No supermoralist ever interferes with the liberty of other people- only moralists do that. By all means let men make as many laws as they like if it amuses them, but let them make them for themselves, and not for others. What business have we to go poking our fingers into other people’s pies? Do you think that by forcing our fellows to do this or that, we are furthering their evolution?"

"There is only one way to further the evolution of your fellows, and that is by persuading them- not by forcing them, mind you- to alter their motives; for motives is everything, actions are secondary. If you can teach people to think with their hearts as well as with their brains, you’ll have done some good."

"A certain point of view... is a prophylactic against all sorrow..and to acquire the right point of view...is the object of all mature thinking. That being so, mental pain is the result of a certain sort of childishness, and a grown-up soul would be as incapable of suffering over the thing you spoke of, as a grown-up person over the breaking of a doll."

"For the man who writes alone for his friends, and not for his enemies as well, falls short of being a true philosopher, by reason of the fact that all real philosophy has missed its goal unless it brings us Peace."

"Pain belongs to the illusory things of life; and it is a characteristic of children to like illusions; their very games consist in pretending to be kings or soldiers or what not. Contentedness, on the other hand, is one of the qualities of maturity... Jealousy...is also, of course, a form of childishness."

"...if one could erase the many unsatisfactory associations connected with the word saint, and rid the word "Superman" of its equally unsatisfactory ones, Justin... might with perfect right be called either of these, or both. Indeed, my association with this truly wonderful man showed me that a saint could exist without exhibiting an ultra-devotional temperament, carrying itself almost to a degree of unpleasantness, and a superman could exist likewise, without that arrogant love of power which is so characteristic of the Nietzschean ideal."

"...in speaking of religion and perfection we must not forget there are certain unreflective persons who imagine that to be perfect means of necessity to be tedious at the same time; they quite fail to realise that dullness is an attribute of imperfection rather than perfection, and that they might with equal lack of rectitude say... that to live in the Nirvana of perpetual bliss would be to live in the tedium of a perpetual hell."

"What we do exist for is principally to guide mankind at large and to give forth such moral, spiritual, and ethical ideas as may be required at a particular time. How is this achieved? Through our chelas who moving in the world and using their discretion, spread such portions of our teaching as they seem wise and as opportunity offers... If they are writers, some of that teaching is set forth in their books; if they are poets, it appears in their poetry; if they are musicians, the spirit of it echoes forth from their music."

"Of course, no doubt sensation mongers would much prefer that we miraculously appeared before our prospective pupils and said: ‘I’m your Guru - come and be my disciple.’ But such is not our policy and never will be."

"One of our rules is never to do things in an extraordinary way, when they can be done in an ordinary way. What we do after the disciple and the Master have become closely linked is another matter."

"Tonight I am going to speak of practically the greatest obstacle to occult Wisdom, spiritual attainment and mystical progress. That obstacle is Conventionality in whatever form it may take, be it in relation to morals or religion. The New Testament writers portrayed the Pharisees as its most typical adherents, and Jesus is reported to have said that the harlots were nearer the kingdom of Heaven than these Pharisees- which, allowing for Oriental hyperbole, is in accordance with fact."

"In a word, show people what they cannot understand and immediately they will ascribe it to something they can understand — for that is ever the tendency of the ignorant."

"True it is that the so-called enlightenment of our twentieth century civilisation seeks to negate or explain away the unusual powers of these men, but deeper thinkers who have taken the trouble to penetrate behind the veil of superficial knowledge are coming to the conclusion that the old truism " where there is smoke there must also be fire " is applicable to the case in point, and that this negation, and explaining away on the part of so-called civilisation is not the result of real knowledge, but of ignorance instead."

"...there are a number of people who may doubt the possibility of attaining to that degree of perfection which he indubitably manifested, thus crediting me with writing romance instead of fact. And yet he does not by any means stand alone at his stage of spiritual evolution, for not only are there many more like him living amongst us at the present time, but if world-history is to be accredited with truth, there have been hundreds as great as and greater than he in the past."

"...to all outward appearance these Adepts are perfectly normal, perfectly human; but it is to outward appearance only... Dressing neither in strange garments nor having in ghost-haunted castles, these men, far from wishing to awaken the curiosity or admiration of their fellows, seek to render themselves as ordinary to the casual observer as they possibly can."

"Let us then try to imagine a human being, devoid of the weaknesses and drawbacks of the ordinary person; a being who is utterly beyond the feelings of selfishness, vanity, jealousy, anger, hatred, and other "vices" of a kindred nature; moreover a being who possesses a consciousness so intense, so infinitely alive as to warrant the expression superconsciousness..."

"...It is absolutely essential that in order to find we must know how to seek, only to him who follows the requisite of this maxim is it possible to discover the truth..."