Poets From England

"Who can cease to admire The ploughman consul in his coarse attire?"

"An ox that waits the coming blow, Old and unprofitable to the plough."

"But oh, how slowly minutes roll When absent from her eyes, That feed my love, which is my soul: It languishes and dies."

"Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame, False to my passion, fatal to my fame, Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?"

"Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms, I filled with love, and she all over charms; Both equally inspired with eager fire, Melting through kindness, flaming in desire. With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace."

"Farewell, woman! I intend Henceforth every night to sit With my lewd, well-natured friend, Drinking to engender wit."

"On thy wither'd lips and dry, Which like barren furrows lie, Brooding kisses I will pour, Shall thy youthful heart restore. (Such kind showers in autumn fall, And a second spring recall); Nor from thee will ever part, Ancient Person of my Heart."

"Lest, once more wandering from that heaven, I fall on some base heart unblest, Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven, And lose my everlasting rest."

"See the kind seed-receiving earth To every grain affords a birth: On her no showers unwelcome fall, Her willing womb retains 'em all, And shall my Caelia be confined? No, live up to thy mighty mind, And be the mistress of Mankind!"

"Thus, Statesman-like, I'll saucily impose, And, safe from Danger, valiantly advise; Sheltered in Impotence, urge you to Blows, And, being good for nothing else, be Wise."

"So, when my Days of Impotence approach, And I'm by Pox and Wine's unlucky chance Driv'n from the pleasing Billows of debauch On the dull Shore of lazy Temperance;My Pains at least some Respite shall afford While I behold the Battles you maintain When Fleets of Glasses sail about the Board, From whose Broad-sides Volleys of Wit shall rain."

"Then talk not of Inconstancy, False Hearts, and broken Vows; If I, by Miracle, can be This live-long Minute true to thee, 'Tis all that Heav'n allows."

"Angels listen when she speaks: She 's my delight, all mankind's wonder; But my jealous heart would break Should we live one day asunder."

"For pointed satire I would Buckhurst choose, The best good man with the worst-natured muse."

"A merry monarch, scandalous and poor."

"Born to myself, I like myself alone, And must conclude my judgment good, or none: For could my sense be naught, how should I know Whether another man's were good or no? Thus I resolve of my own poetry, That 'tis the best; and there's a fame for me. If then I'm happy, what does it advance, Whether to merit due, or arrogance? Oh, but the world will take offence hereby! Why then the world shall suffer for 't, not I. Did eer this saucy world and I agree, To let it have its beastly will on me? Why should my prostituted sense be drawn To every rule their musty customs spawn? But men may censure you; 'tis two to one, Whene'er they censure, they'll be in the wrong. There's not a thing on Earth, that I can name, So foolish, and so false, as common fame. It calls the courtier knave, the plain man rude, Haughty the grave, and the delightful lewd, Impertinent the brisk, morose the sad, Mean the familiar, the reserv'd-one mad. Poor helpless woman is not favour'd more, She's a sly hypocrite, or public whore. Then who the Devil would give this — to be free From th' innocent reproach of infamy These things consider'd, make me (in despite Of idle rumour) keep at home and write."

"It is a good world to live in, To lend, or to spend, or to give in; But to beg or to borrow, or to get a man's own, It is the very worst world that ever was known."

"Dead we become the lumber of the world."

"The world appears like a great family, Whose lord, oppressed with pride and poverty, (That to the few great bounty he may show) Is fain to starve the numerous train below."

"If you have a grateful heart (which is a miracle amongst you statesmen), show it by directing the bearer to the best wine in town, and pray let not this highest point of sacred friendship be performed slightly, but go about it with all due deliberation and care, as holy priests to sacrifice, or as discreet thieves to the wary performance of burglary and shop-lifting. Let your well-discerning palate (the best judge about you) travel from cellar to cellar and then from piece to piece till it has lighted on wine fit for its noble choice and my approbation."

"But a meek humble Man of modest Sense, Who, Preaching Peace, does practice Continence; Whose pious life's a proof he does believe, Mysterious Truths, which no Man can conceive. If upon Earth there dwell such God-like Men, I'll here Recant my Paradox to them; Adore those Shrines of Virtue, homage pay, And, with the rabble world, their Laws obey. If such there are, yet grant me This at least, Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast."

"Most Men are Cowards, all Men should be Knaves. The Difference lies, as far as I can see, Not in the thing it self, but the Degree."

"For all Men would be Cowards if they durst: And Honesty's against all common Sense."

"For Wits are treated just like Common Whores; First they're enjoy'd, and then kickt out of Doors."

"Then Old Age, and Experience, hand in hand, Lead him to death, and make him understand, After a Search so painful, and so long, That all his Life he has been in the wrong."

"Whilst the misguided Follower climbs with Pain, Mountains of Whimsies, heapt in his own Brain, Stumbling from Thought to Thought, falls headlong down Into Doubt's boundless Sea, where like to drown, Books bear him up a-while, and make him try To swim with Bladders of Philosophy."

"As I had the honour of living in the same house, 142, Strand, with George Eliot for about two years, between 1851 and 1854, I may perhaps be allowed to correct an impression which Mr. Cross's book may possibly produce on its readers. To put it very briefly, I think he has made her too ‘respectable.’ She was really one of the most sceptical, unusual creatures I ever knew, and it was this side of her character which to me was the most attractive. She told me that it was worth while to undertake all the labour of learning French if it resulted in nothing more than reading one book—Rousseau's Confessions. That saying was perfectly symbolical of her, and reveals more completely what she was, at any rate in 1851–54, than page after page of attempt on my part at critical analysis, I can see her now, with her hair over her shoulders, the easy chair half sideways to the fire, her feet over the arms, and a proof in her hands, in that dark room at the back of No. 142, and I confess I hardly recognize her in the pages of Mr. Cross's—on many accounts—most interesting volumes. I do hope that in some future edition, or in some future work, the salt and spice will be restored to the records of George Eliot’s entirely unconventional life."

"If you were in Russia, I would send you Eliot's "Scenes of Clerical Life," but now I only ask you to read it, especially "Janet's Repentance." Fortunate are the people who, like the English, imbibe Christian teachings with their mother's milk, and in such an elevated, purified form, as Evangelical Protestantism. Here is a moral as well as a religious book, but one which I liked very much and which made a powerful impression on me..."

"Middlemarch by George Eliot. A work of genius. But more important — and from a purely selfish point of view — a woman wrote it. That might seem ridiculous to male writers, but a man never has to think twice about the gender of genius. He’s got too many examples on his side of the fence. Eliot was the first woman I read who could go toe-to-toe with, say, Tolstoy. I was 15. Since then, I’ve learned how many grand achievements in the novel have been female, but when I was a teenager, that was news to me."

"George Eliot never ended her books properly. There's so little for heroines to do; they can fall in love, they can die. As the story begins, you wonder whether the heroine will be happy, but by the middle of it you're beginning to wonder if she will be good. Such is George Eliot's sleight-of-hand. i.e. cheating. We still think this way a hundred years later."

"Emily Dickinson was always stirred by the existences of women like George Eliot or Elizabeth Barrett, who possessed strength of mind, articulateness, and energy."

"There's been some change, as is evident by the number of women writers who are read. And education itself has somewhat changed. There's a lot more encouragement, a lot more writing classes. It was the women's movement that gave women in academe a certain strength. If you'd look at the old reading lists, maybe George Eliot, the Bront‘s, Virginia Woolf might be taught. At Stanford, I think it was 1971, they needed somebody [to teach their first-ever course on women's literature], and my name was suggested. Well, I had no credentials. I had never gone to college. And there was quite a to-do about whether or not I had the qualifications. It was supposed to be a small class. I went into this auditorium. It was jammed. There were, I think, four guys, one of whom went out and then came back again and then went out and then came back again. There were over 100 women there, including faculty wives. By and large, none of this had ever been taught at Stanford before."

"If you want to know what's going on in the world, if you're interested in politics and history, you go to George Eliot"

"Once, when she [Eliot] was asked which real-life person had been the inspiration for Casaubon — a man whose "soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic; it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its own winds and never flying" — she tapped her own breast."

"the rolling English prose of George Eliot"

"Feminist literary critics have shown how in the 19th century women writers began to acknowledge women as their muses and their role models. Thus, George Eliot admired Harriet Beecher Stowe and was decisively influenced in her work by a thorough reading of the works of Jane Austen...The list could be indefinitely extended to show the almost desperate search of writing women for authoritative female predecessors."

"The phrase "double life" used in a book on George Eliot would usually apply to the double identity of Marian Evans (or Lewes) and "George Eliot," as when [Clare] Carlisle talks of Eliot's bringing together "the two parts of herself." She shows us her subject as intensely conscious of her double life as writer and woman, at one time keeping a diary with the front part recording events in the life of Mrs. Lewes and the back pages recording her authorial achievements. In old age Eliot (as Carlisle refers to her as a writer) described her creative life as her "higher life" "that is young and grows, though in my other life I am getting old and decaying." But "double life" in this biography has a double meaning. It also refers to her coexistence with Lewes, which George Eliot called "a shared life, a double life," describing their inseparable intimacy as "a sort of Siamese-twin condition" or, more ominously, a "dual egotism." When she adopted her pseudonym in 1857 in order to write fiction without being judged as a woman, she chose her first name not only in tribute to George Sand but as a mark of her connection to George Lewes."

"Folks will want things intellectually done, so they take refuge in George Eliot. I am very fond of her, but I wish she'd take her specs off, and come down off the public platform."

"You see, it was really George Eliot who started it all... It was she who started putting all the action inside."

"Perhaps you thought that George Eliot was the author of Middlemarch. No: according to Professor Eagleton, the phrase “George Eliot” signifies nothing more than the insertion of certain specific ideological determinations -- Evangelical Christianity, rural organicism, incipient feminism, petty-bourgeois moralism -- into a hegemonic ideological formation which is partly supported, partly embarrassed by their presence. [...] The idea is to downgrade the notion of individual genius, as if George Eliot's personal contribution to the writing of Middlemarch were somehow accidental, the more important thing being the “specific ideological determinations” she embodied. The main point of all this is that nothing is what it seems; or, as Professor Eagleton puts it in Criticism and Ideology, “there is no ‘immanent’ value": everything in the realm of culture is determined by something outside culture–namely (catch that whiff of vulgarity?) the oppressive economic relations of capitalism."

"What is remarkable, extraordinary — and the process remains inscrutable and mysterious — is that this quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures, without extravagance, assumption, or bravado, should have made us believe that nothing in the world was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multifold life of man."

"She is magnificently ugly — deliciously hideous... in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her."

"Epigrams are at best half-truths that look like whole ones. Here is a handful about George Eliot. It has been said of her books—('on several occasions')—that 'it is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as treatises, or treatises disguised as novels'; that, 'while less romantic than Euclid's Elements, they are on the whole a great deal less improving reading'; and that 'they seem to have been dictated to a plain woman of genius by the ghost of David Hume.' Herself, too, has been variously described: as 'An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery'; as 'George Sand plus Science and minus Sex'; as 'Pallas with prejudices and a corset'; as 'the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus.' The comparison of her admirable talent to 'not the imperial violin but the grand ducal violoncello' seems suggestive and is not unkind."

"What I'm getting at, among other things, is that Eliot is masterly in execution, but above and beyond that is that extra something of singular genius of which I would say: perhaps one improves by reading these books — or, these books have the power to invigorate. I recently re-read Eliot's Felix Holt, The radical. This book has been very well translated into Dutch. I hope you know it — if you don't know it, see if you can't get hold of it somewhere. There are certain ideas about life in it that I find outstanding — profound things said in a plain way — it's a book written with great spirit, and various scenes are described exactly as Frank Holl or someone like him would draw them. It's a similar conception and outlook. There aren't many writers who are as thoroughly sincere and good as Eliot."

"Have you read anything beautiful lately? Do make sure somehow to get hold of and read the books by Eliot, you won't be sorry, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, Romola (Savonarola’s story), Scenes of clerical life. You know we gave the 3 underlined ones to Pa on his birthday last year. When I get the time for reading, I'll read them again."

"(Are there other English language writers who mean a lot to you?) NG: Well, of course, Shakespeare. And I love George Eliot as well."

"I read Madame Bovary and Jane Austen and George Eliot over and over."

"The highest form of knowledge, according to George Eliot, is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world."

"Writing is also a profession, and, at its best, an honourable one. It has been made honourable by those who have already been members of it. Whether you like it or not, every time you set pen to paper you’re staring at the same blank space that confronted Milton, Melville, Emily Bronte, Dostoevsky and George Eliot, George Orwell and William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams, not to mention the latest hero, Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away."