James Russell Lowell Quotes

The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

To be a mere verbal critic is what no man of genius would be if he could; but to be a critic of true taste and feeling is what no man without genius could be if he would.

A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying, 'Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

A critic who uses new quotations is making important changes.

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

A critic is never too severe when he only detects the faults of an author. But he is worse than too severe when, in consequence of this detection, be presumes to place himself on a level with genius.

A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

The eyes of critics, whether in commending or carping, are both on one side, like a turbot's.

Critics I don't understand. They get too intellectual. They're not very well-versed in street talk; it takes them longer to say it. So they have to do it in dictionaries and they take longer to say it.

The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it-when unpopular.

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

Criticism is as often a trade as a science, requiring, as it does, more health than wit, more labour than capacity, more practice than genius.

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.

The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.

Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism.

Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. 'And what did you do?' asks Saint Peter. 'Well', says the dead soul. 'I criticised things'. 'I beg your pardon?' 'You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, "thin and unconvincing", "turgid and uninspired", "competent and serviceable,"...you know'.