Margaret Fuller Quotes

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

A critic must accept what is best in a poet, and thus become his best encourager.

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

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.

A critic who uses new quotations is making important changes.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.