“This is old song
That will not declare itself…”
"Metaphors of a Magnifico"
Harmonium (1923)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Wallace Stevens278
American poet 1879–1955Related quotes
“Genius declares itself to be a kind of higher masculinity.”
Otto Weininger book Sex and Character
Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 111.
“I would secede from the old and declare the new.”
Garry Davis (1921–2013) American actor turned peace activist (1921-2013)
My Country is the World (1984)
“The song that nerves a nation's heart
Is in itself a deed.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate
Epilogue to The Charge of the Heavy Brigade, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
(3rd March 1827) Birthday in Spring
The London Literary Gazette, 1827
“Labour itself is but a sorrowful song,
The protest of the weak against the strong.”
Frederick William Faber (1814–1863) British hymn writer and theologian
The Sorrowful World.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet
Preface to A Way Out : A One-act Play (1929)
General sources
Context: Everything written is as good as it is dramatic. It need not declare itself in form, but it is drama or nothing. A least lyric alone may have a hard time, but it can make a beginning, and lyric will be piled on lyric till all are easily heard as sung or spoken by a person in a scene — in character, in a setting. By whom, where and when is the question.
“Great care has gone into the construction of the shadow which declares itself to be Richard Nixon.”
Murray Kempton (1917–1997) American journalist