“Pope has more virulence and less vehemence than any of the great satirists. His character of Sporus is the perfection of satirical writing. The very sound of words scarify before the sense strikes.”
Table Talk" p. 64
Under the Hill and Other Essays (1904)
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Aubrey Beardsley 19
English illustrator and author 1872–1898Related quotes

Preface to Lehrreicher Geschicht-Herold
Other Quotes

Source: 300 Tang Poems: A New Translation (1987), p. xxii

Superman Comes to the Supermarket http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3858/superman-supermarket/ (November 1960)
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

The Paris Review interview
Context: Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity. When cockerels confront each other and daren’t fight, they busily start pecking imaginary grains off to the side. That’s displaced activity. Much of what we do at any level is a bit like that, I fancy. But hard to know which is which. On the other hand, the machinery has to be kept running. The big problem for those who write verse is keeping the machine running without simply exercising evasion of the real confrontation. If Ulanova, the ballerina, missed one day of practice, she couldn’t get back to peak fitness without a week of hard work. Dickens said the same about his writing—if he missed a day he needed a week of hard slog to get back into the flow.

“Poetry is no more, no less than a mosaic of words, so great exactness is required for each one.”
Notes on Language and Style (1929)