“He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse: but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.”
The Life of Milton
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Samuel Johnson362
English writer 1709–1784Related quotes
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher
12 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer
Oxford Anthology of American Literature 1938
Prose
“Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.”
R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet
"Poetry For Supper"
Poetry For Supper (1958)
Context: Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life's iron crust
Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.
“The lesson is that dying men must groan;
And poets groan in rhymes that please the ear.”
John Wain (1925–1994) British writer
Poem Don't let's spoil it all, I thought that we were going to be such good friends.
F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet
Otherworld Cadences (1920)
Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) French historian and philosopher
trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 91
La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001)
Context: Only he who is capable of a genuine encounter with the other is capable of an authentic encounter with himself, and the converse is equally true…From this perspective, every spiritual exercise is a dialogue, insofar as it is an exercise of authentic presence, to oneself and to others.
George Whitefield (1714–1770) English minister and preacher
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 543.
John Livingston Lowes (1867–1945) American academic
Conventions and Revolt in Poetry (1919)