“Such were the notes thy once lov'd poet sung,
Till death untimely stopp'd his tuneful tongue.”
"Epistle to Robert, Earl of Oxford and Mortimer" preface to Thomas Parnell's Poems on Several Occasions (1721).
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Alexander Pope 158
eighteenth century English poet 1688–1744Related quotes
Arion from The London Literary Gazette (23rd November 1822) Fragments in Rhyme IV
The Improvisatrice (1824)
“America is a tune. It must be sung together.”
Book V, Part III, Chapter XII.
Crowds (1913)
“Many a bard's untimely death
Lends unto his verses breath”
"To a Poet Who Died Young" in Second April (1921), p. 52
Context: Many a bard's untimely death
Lends unto his verses breath;
Here's a song was never sung:
Growing old is dying young.
“I have sung my songs to my own tunes”
What It Means to Be a Poet in America (1926)
Context: I have sung my songs to my own tunes for most of the English departments of the state universities of the forty-eight states of the nation, and the English departments of other universities and colleges; and I have been recalled to many of these seven and eight times, which matters are a source of great pride to me. And I have brought out three books where the songs were based on my own pen-and-ink pictures.
“I am the poet who once tuned his song
On a slender reed and then leaving the woods
Compelled the fields to obey the hungry farmer,
A pleasing work. But now War's grim and savage …”
Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena
Carmen, et egressus silvis vicina coegi
Ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono,
Gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis<!--
Arma virumque cano--> ...
Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena
Carmen, et egressus silvis vicina coegi
Ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono,
Gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis ...
Spurious opening lines of the Aeneid (tr. Stanley Lombardo), not found in the earliest manuscripts. Attributed to Virgil on the authority of "the grammarian Nisus", who claimed to have "heard from older men" that Varius had "emended the beginning of the first book by striking out" the four introductory lines, as reported in Suetonius' Life of Vergil http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/de_Poetis/Vergil*.html, 42 (Loeb translation). John Conington, in his Commentary on Vergil's Aeneid, remarks: "The external evidence of such a story it is impossible to estimate, but its existence suspiciously indicates that the lines were felt to require apology" (Vol. II, p. 30).
Attributed
Love in a Village (1762), Act i, scene 2.
“Sweeter than any sung
My songs that found no tongue”
My Triumph, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Context: Sweeter than any sung
My songs that found no tongue;
Nobler than any fact
My wish that failed of act.
Others shall sing the song,
Others shall right the wrong,—
Finish what I begin,
And all I fail of win.
“Let thy mind rule thy tongue!”
The Sayings of the Wise (1555)