“There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.”

Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 3

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H.L. Mencken281

American journalist and writer 1880–1956

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“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devils' party without knowing it.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

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“I bet you anything I could destroy Milton Friedman in a debate about economics — so long as the audience was comprised of five year olds. He may have a Nobel Prize, but I can make offensive sounds with my armpit. Advantage: Goldberg!”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

July 19, 2004 http://web.archive.org/web/20040421/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200407190837.asp <br class="br">2000s, 2004

“Our first of poets was one of our first of men. He was an eminent instance to prove that a poet is not another name for the slave of power and fashion … who merely aspire to make up the pageant and show of the day. There are persons in common life who … can so little bear to be left for any length of time out of the grand carnival and masquerade of pride and folly, that they will gain admittance to it at the expense of their characters … Milton was not one of these. He had lofty contemplative principle, and consciousness of inward power and worth, [not] to be tempted by such idle baits.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

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“Milton's Paradise Lost is admirable; but am I therefore bound to maintain, that there are no flats amongst his elevations, when it is evident he creeps along sometimes for above an hundred lines together? Cannot I admire the height of his invention, and the strength of his expression, without defending his antiquated words, and the perpetual harshness of their sound? It is as much commendation as a man can bear, to own him excellent; all beyond it is idolatry.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Preface to Translations from Theocritus, Lucretius, and Horace, in Sylvæ: or, The second part of Poetical Miscellanies, published by Mr. Dryden, third edition (London, 1702).

“Verse no longer stands at the centre of communicative discourse. It is no longer, as it was from Homer to Milton, the natural repository of knowledge and traditional sentiment. It no longer gives to society its main record of past grandeur or its natural setting for prophecy, as it did in Virgil and Dante. Verse has grown private. It is a special language which the individual poet insinuates, by force of personal genius, into the awareness of his contemporaries, persuading to learn and perhaps hand on his own uses of words. Poetry has become essentially lyric — that is to say, it is the poetry of private vision rather than of public or of national occasion.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. IX (p. 309).

“I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

“The poet's business is not to save the soul of man but to make it worth saving.”

James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) Poet

Quoted by Louis Untermeyer in Modern British Poetry http://books.google.com/books?id=GiwMAQAAIAAJ&q=%22The+poet's+business%22+%22is+not+to+save+the+soul+of+man+but+to+make+it+worth+saving%22&pg=PA178#v=onepage (1920)

“Call it not vain;—they do not err,
Who say, that when the Poet dies,
Mute Nature mourns her worshipper,
And celebrates his obsequies.”

Walter Scott The Lay of the Last Minstrel

Canto V, stanza 1.
The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)

“Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality…and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 186)

“If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.”

Gregory Corso (1930–2001) American writer

“There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.”

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H.L. Mencken281

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