“Is she not more than painting can express,
Or youthful poets fancy when they love?”
Nicholas Rowe The Fair Penitent
Act iii, scene 1.
The Fair Penitent (1703)
“One never knows whether the Poet is speaking fact, fancy, or allegory. If fancy is clever enough, I doubt that the Poet would admit a difference between fancy and fact.”
Ch 21
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Lux
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Walter M. Miller, Jr.37
American fiction writer 1923–1996Related quotes
“There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor
Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN
Commencement address at Michigan State University The New York Times (9 June 1958)
Context: You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.
“A poet soaring in the high reason of his fancies, with his garland and singing robes about him.”
John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet
The Reason of Church Government (1641), Book II, Introduction
Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN
Commencement address at Michigan State University The New York Times (9 June 1958)
Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864–1929) British sociologist
Source: Liberalism (1911), Chapter VIII, Economic Liberalism, p. 89.
Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist
Life Without and Life Within (1859), The One In All
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Context: Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.
This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain.