John Dryden Quotes

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

I'm very much a romantic. I'm highly attuned to an older sensibility, which I believe is alive and well. We're not that far ahead of the Romantic Age in society.

Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.

But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

I hate Shakespeare. I think Shakespeare's rubbish.

If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

I read 'the Hobbit' at the age when you're supposed to read it. I didn't read 'The Lord Of The Rings.' My father, who was an English teacher, advised me that once I had read 'the Hobbit,' that would be enough. I could then move on to Dostoyevsky.

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

We sold 400 books of poetry and thought we were well on the way to immortality.

It's hard to write haiku. I write long, silly Indian poems.

My thesis at school was on Wordsworth.

I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.

The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. Although he was blind, Milton had one of the most unswerving gazes of all English poets.

One of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced.

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.

WhenTime shall turn those amber locks to grey, My verse again shall gild and make them gay.

I have always loved American poetry, which is very different from Irish poetry.

England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.

In the Augustan age ... poetry was ... the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature.