Literary Critics

"You appear to have seen Holcrofts pamphlet; which certainly displays much ability and goodwriting, but most of all the extreme vanity and self-importance of the author, which is equally ridiculous and disgusting. He thinks it impossible that any court or jury in the world could have resisted the force of his combined eloquence and philosophy; and actually told me that hewould gladly have given one of his hands for the opportunity of making his defence, which by the way would certainly have hanged him, however favourable his judges might have been beforehand."

"Talking of historys, i suppose we are to have nothing further from that fellow Hutchinson: We shall therefore lose the most interesting part of his subject. An ATTORNEY, who HAS BUT ONE OBJECT AND THAT IS THE LUCRE OF GAIN, should never be encourageed in attempts of this nature."

"I shall be glad if you will inform me who was the editor of Montrose's memoirs, published in 1756. I had understood him to be the late lord Hailes, which I now fancy a mistake, as his lordships character seems to savour too much of the virulency of whiggism for an admirer of Montrose."

"I suppose you will find citizen Hodgsons translation of the Systime executed in a very slovenly and inaccurate manner. The poor fellow is starving in Newgate, and I do not understand he is likely to receive much benefit by the sale of his work."

"You must cease to consider Lord Hailes as a most faithful publisher; as I who have collated many of his articles with the Bannatyne MS. know the contrary to my cost. I do not, indeed, mean to say that he is so intentionally faithless as Ramsay; but I do say that his transcripts have been very inaccurate, that he has in numerous instances wilfully altered the original orthography, and not unfrequently misinterpreted the text of the MS. which I suspect he was occasionally unable to read."

"Have you seen our friend Langdales History of North Allerton? You will hear, perhaps, or suspect that I gave him some little assistance; but he seems to have been beholden to a much cleverer fellow. I dare say you will not think me capable of saying that a structure was pulled down by "illiterate hands.""

"Your observations on Godwins inaccuracies are well founded. I apprised him of all or most of them long ago; and can only attribute their retention to his obstinacy, or ignorance, I am, however, preparing another list for him. They say he is about another novel."

"I have been able to meet with no further intelligence about Sir Alexander Halket. He is said to be the author of Gilderoy, and I strongly suspect him to have had a principal hand in the forgery of Hardyknute, which is all that I know of him."

"As writing seems to be attended with some difficulty if not uneasiness, you have only to put down a figure of 4 or 5 before a cypher to satisfy me of the verity of the matter: a nod, you know, is as good as a wink to a blind horse."

"This is believed to be the completest list of this voluminous, prosiack, and driveling monk, that can be formed...in truth, and fact, these stupid and fatigueing productions, which by no means deserve the name of poetry, and their stil more stupid and disgusting author, who disgraces the name and patronage of his master Chaucer, are neither worth collecting (unless it be as typographical curiositys, or on account of the beautyful illuminations in some of his presentation copys), not even worthy of preservation: being only suitablely adapted "ad ficum & piperem," and other more bare and servile uses. How little he profited by the correction, or instructions of his great patron is manifest in almost every part of his elaborate drawlings, in which there are scarcely three lines together of pure and acurate metre."

"You will do Mr. Malone great injustice if you suppose him to be in all respects what I may have endeavoured to represent him in some. In order that he may recover your more favourable opinion, let me recommend to your perusal, the discussion, in his prolegomena, intitled "Shakspeare, Ford and Jonson ;." and his "Dissertation on the three parts of King Henry the Sixth" (to which I am more indebted for an acquaintance with the manner of our great dramatic poet than to any thing I ever read)."

"Our friend Pinkerton, I am told, to complete the infamy of his character, has turned critical reviewer, a situation, of course, which admits neither truth nor honesty. He will therefore have the pleasure of thundering his own damnation upon the heads of others, among whom, I suppose, he will take care not to forget...J. Ritson"

"From the falsehood, impudence and scurrility of The Critical Review, I conclude that Pinkerton is one of its principal authors, and particularly the gentleman to whom I and my little publication are so much obliged. You will think me too revengeful when I wish he were compelled to subscribe his name to his criticisms. The Shakspeare papers, of which you have heard so much, and which I have carefully examined, are, I can assure you, a parcel of forgeries, studiously and ably calculated to deceive the public: the imposition being, in point of art and foresight, beyond any thing of the kind that has been witnessed since the days of Annius Viterbiensis..."

"You will have heard, I presume, that Wintons Chronicle, by a Mr. Macpherson, is in great forwardness. It is to surpass, in point of correctness and typography, any thing that has hitherto appeared. But, I confess, the specimen I have seen betrayed symptoms of licentiousness and affectation which I can neither approve of nor account for."

"It may be impossible to prolong life, but it is frequently in our power to smooth the approaches of death; and they who die happily are certainly more to be envied than those who live otherwise."

"Dr. Percy has confounded the vesper bell with the curfew. The reason of this temporary cessation of bloodshed, proceeded from respect to the Virgin Mary; for, at this hour, the angelical salutation was sung; whence it was sometimes called the Ave Maria bell. It is still customary, upon the Spanish stage, for the actors, in the midst of the grossest and most indecent buffoonery, to fall down on their knees, and pull out their beads, at the sound of this bell."

"Mr. Pinkerton is neither the first, nor likely to be the last, fabricator of Old Scotish Ballads."

"I am sorry to say that Dr. Farmer has not been able to find the volume of tracts containing "Sir D. Lindsays Satire." He supposes it to have been lent to Mr. Malone, to whom Mr. Steevens has promised to make immediate application. But perhaps you have already learned that Pinkerton has lately published these satires from a (very incorrect) copy of the Hyndford MS. together with the various readings of the printed edition: published under the name of J. Nichols, for C. Dilly in the Poultry, 3 vols, crown 8vo. price 9s. He has had the impudence and dishonesty to insert in this collection a curious old MS. poem in my possession, of which a friend of his had some years since surreptitiously obtained a copy, and which on that friends application from him, I positively refused my leave to print."

"Pinkerton seems busy in his intended history of Scotland; whether it is to be the same with that advertised under the name of Robert Heron, I cannot learn. His treatment of the " Celtic savages" is to be speedily resented in print by the Reverend John Lane Buchanan, nominal author of "Travels in the Western Hebrides," who seems in fact, to be as very a Celt as his antagonist could possibly wish for. I am sorry to find so good a cause in the hands of such an incompetent advocate."

"Great music is a psychical storm, agitating to fathomless depths the mystery of the past within us."

"When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic prejudices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work. … The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind. … The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods."

"Jehovah … gave his worshippers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity."

"Philanthropy means to steal wholesale, and give away retail."

"The blood of three oppressed races runs in my veins."

"I am proudest of my Negro extraction."

"But Juan Antonio Villacañas was more than a social poet, or a poet of the universe or a religious poet, or a poet of human themes, or a poet of love. Villacañas, apart from being a generous person, cordial, a poet in the deepest sense of the word, he is, above all, a poet of all times, a poet of yesterday, a poet of tomorrow. A poet who, in life, despite prizes and triumphs, did not get the recognition that other inferior poets had. Especially during his last years “critics” turned their back to him. But he remained faithful to that which was his passion. Poetry, a poetry that has the flow of a river, the serenity of an autumn day, the light that must be in the look of God."

"Whether Villacañas wrote in liras, free verse or whatever form, his poetry constantly springs from a profound search for transcendence and a concern from humanity that can make him to be at once social and spiritual. The vigour of his verses gives them quite often a muscular quality which appears equally in his most earthy poems of indictment or solidarity and in those in which he looks for God, suffers His silence or talks to Him."

"I come to make song, after the tears. And even if a choir of men sprayed my tongue with silence, poetry will come, with liberating voice, to make my song fall from the trees and reach the most deeply buried abysses of those tears that the child lent me when crying himself into life.Because my infant song is stronger than man’s tears, and it could even conquer me robbing the need of tears from the sun and the wind."

"If pain does not die we shall make it poetry."

"Thought is a flower from other worlds, a tale that is torn in each written word. ……………I go outdoors to give rest to the soul’s tired muscles."

"The earth is brief, as brief as a man’s solemnity. ……… When you, Earth, stop palpitating in my flesh I, flesh, will give you all my earth."

"Death is a life of questions that are being buried, and one ends always with doubt tangled in the lips."

"God borders my incredulity constantly. And my incredulity is so much God, that I am almost sure to adore Him."

"I have an immensity which shivers in the oceans, being, as I am, only a little fountain, small as an eye."

"Free verse may be written as very beautiful prose; prose may be written as very beautiful free verse. Which is which ?"

"There is one way, and only one, of correctly reading a Latin hexameter. There may be three or four ways of reading an English blank verse line. I venture to say that no two mortals ever read aloud any given long passage of verse with precisely the same rhythms."

"W C Williams' poetry is: The Imagism of 1912, self-transduced."

"Communist ethics make it the highest duty to accept the necessity to act wickedly. This, he said, was the greatest sacrifice the revolution asked from us. The conviction of the true communist is that evil transforms itself into bliss through the dialectics of historical evolution."

"The international disputes which united and divided Luxemburg, Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, Bordiga or Trotsky on these issues represent the last great strategic debate in the European workers’ movement. Since then, there has been little significant theoretical development of the political problems of revolutionary strategy in metropolitan capitalism that has had any direct contact with the masses. The structural divorce between original Marxist theory and the main organizations of the working class in Europe has yet to be historically resolved. The May-June revolt in France, the upheaval in Portugal, the approaching dénouement in Spain, presage the end of this long divorce, but have not accomplished it. The classical debates, therefore, still remain in many respects the most advanced limit of reference we possess today. It is thus not mere archaism to recall the strategic confrontations which occurred four or five decades ago. To reappropriate them, on the contrary, is a step towards a Marxist discussion that has the—necessarily modest—hope of assuming an ‘initial shape’ of correct theory today. Régis Debray has spoken, in a famous paragraph, of the constant difficulty of being contemporary with our present. In Europe at least, we have yet to be sufficiently contemporary with our past."

"From a very early stage the ideological history of the bourgeoisie was nothing but a desperate resistance to every insight into the true nature of the society it had created."

"The work of Lukacs is important, not because he solves but because he poses in its sharpest and most acute form the fundamental dilemma of the Marxist conception of class and of the proletariat, the dilemma of the gap between the proletariat as an empirical entity and the role assigned by history to the proletariat as a class—the gap which Marx revealed, but did not explore, when he invented the dismissive category of the "Lumpenproletariat"."

"At this point bourgeois thought must come up against an insuperable obstacle, for its starting-point and its goal are always, if not always consciously, an apologia for the existing order."

"Our present needs should surely drive us to a re-examination of Marx's method of inquiry, and put an end to a situation in which so many historians, philosophers and sociologists of the English-speaking world (the economists, impressed by the economic foundations of Marxism, have done rather better) by-pass Marx altogether or treat him as of barely peripheral interest to their concerns. Lukacs's extreme anti-empiricism may be an exemplar of the opposite vice. But this should not excuse our myopia. It is rather as if a modern mathematician did not take the trouble to master Einstein, and went on with his studies as if Einstein had never existed."

"The highest degree of consciousness, the crassest form of 'false consciousness' always manifests itself when the conscious mastery of economic phenomena appears to be at its greatest."

""We are in the war," said Lukacs, when I cried out against the shooting of six men from that first regiment which "quite simply ran away at the first fire." "In war, fugitives and traitors must be shot. If not, all right, then, let the Czechs in and the revolution will be lost." I hope there is some pacifist revolutionary with an answer to that. I have none."

"History does not merely unfold within the terrain mapped out by these institutions. It does not resolve itself into the evolution of contents, of men and situations, etc., while the principles of society remain eternally valid. ... On the contrary, history is precisely the history of these institutions, of the changes they undergo as institutions which bring men together in societies. Such institutions start by controlling economic relations between men and go on to permeate all human relations (and hence also man's relations with himself and with nature)."

"Critical philosophy implies above all historical criticism. It dissolves the rigid, unhistorical, natural appearance of social institutions; it reveals their historical origins."

"The function of these unmediated concepts that have been derived from the fetishistic forms of objectivity is to make the phenomena of capitalist society appear as supra-rational historical essences."

"In Marx the dialectical method aims at understanding society as a whole. Bourgeois thought concerns itself with objects that arise either from the process of studying phenomena in isolation, or from the division of labor and specialisation in the different disciplines."

"Bourgeois thought judges social phenomena conscious or unconsciously, naïvely or subtly, consistently from the standpoint of the individual. No path leads from the individual to the totality."