“He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.”
Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer
Source: Zuleika Dobson http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/zdbsn11.txt (1911), Ch. III
Source: The Tale of Despereaux (2004)
“He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.”
Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer
Source: Zuleika Dobson http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/zdbsn11.txt (1911), Ch. III
“…he had to admit to a faint admiration (faint as angostura colouring gin and water)”
Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer
Fiction, Devil of a State (1961)
“Not every poet is a great reader of his own work.”
David Yezzi (1966) American poet
Interview with Ernest Hibert (2006)
William McKeen (1954) American academic
Preface, The End, p. xv
Outlaw Journalist (2008)
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist
"Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935) [p. 8]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man
Source: The Vocation of Man (1800), P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 2
Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician
Part 1: "The Creative Mind", §9 ( p. 20 http://books.google.com/books?id=TeHXAAAAMAAJ&q=%22We+re-make+nature+by+the+act+of+discovery+in+the+poem+or+in+the+theorem+And+the+great+poem+and+the+deep+theorem+are+new+to+every+reader+and+yet+are+his+own+experience+because+he+himself+re-creates+them%22&pg=PA20#v=onepage) <br class="br">Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)
John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet
Letter to John Taylor (February 27, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)
Context: In Poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity — it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance — Its touches of Beauty should never be halfway thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural to him — shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the luxury of twilight — but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it — and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.