“Is Freedom only a Will-o'-the-wisp
To cheat a poet's eye?
Be it phantom or fact, it's a noble cause
In which to sing and to die!”

—  Joyce Kilmer

Main Street and Other Poems (1917), Apology
Context: Lord Byron and Shelley and Plunkett,
McDonough and Hunt and Pearse
See now why their hatred of tyrants
Was so insistently fierce.
Is Freedom only a Will-o'-the-wisp
To cheat a poet's eye?
Be it phantom or fact, it's a noble cause
In which to sing and to die!

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Is Freedom only a Will-o'-the-wisp To cheat a poet's eye? Be it phantom or fact, it's a noble cause In which to sing…" by Joyce Kilmer?
Joyce Kilmer photo
Joyce Kilmer 42
American poet, editor, literary critic, soldier 1886–1918

Related quotes

William T. Sherman photo

“Slavery was the cause… [O]ur success was to be his freedom.”

William T. Sherman (1820–1891) American General, businessman, educator, and author.

Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman https://books.google.com/books?id=cwVkgrvctCcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Eric+Foner%22+%22Republicans%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiOwdup3aLLAhVK7SYKHZufDmUQ6AEIRjAH#v=onepage&q=%22Eric%20Foner%22%20%22Republicans%22&f=false (1891), New York, pp. 2:180–81
1890s, 1891

Orson Scott Card photo

“I don’t plan to die for any cause,” said Jim Bowie. “Nor any man, excepting only myself. I know that ain’t noble, but it prolongs my days, which is philosophy enough for me.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, The Crystal City (2003), Chapter 17 “Foundation” (p. 334).

William Faulkner photo

“The poets are wrong of course. … But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.”

William Faulkner book The Town

Gavin Stevens in Ch. 5
The Town (1957)

Bob Marley photo

“Won't you help to sing,
These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever had,
Redemption songs.”

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

Redemption Song
Uprising (1979)

Pope Pius VI photo

“It is nature herself, therefore, which (decrees) that the usage which each must make of his reason should consist essentially in recognizing his sovereign author. ... In order to make this phantom of unlimited freedom vanish from the eyes of healthy reason, is it not enough to say that this system was that of the Vaudois and the Beguars?”

Pope Pius VI (1717–1799) pope and sovereign of the Papal States

Quod aliquantum (10 March 1791), quoted in André Latreille and Joseph E. Cunneen, 'The Catholic Church and the Secular State: The Church and the Secularization of Modern Societies', CrossCurrents Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring 1963), p. 221

Wilhelm Liebknecht photo

“A practical surrender of our party principles appears to me far more dangerous than all of Bernstein’s theoretical will-o’-the-wisps put together. … Democratic elements do not thereby become Socialists, though many believe they are socialists. … This political socialism, which in fact is only philanthropic humanitarian radicalism, … it has diluted and blurred the principles and weakened the socialist party because it brought into it troops upon which no reliance could be placed in the decisive moment.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Patrick Rothfuss photo

“A poet is a musician who can't sing.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

Gianni Sarcone photo

“Are the eyes an open door to the world, as poets say? Well, honestly, not really. The fact is, we see the world through a pair of tiny peepholes, the pupils of our eyes.”

Gianni Sarcone (1962) Italian author, artist, designer, and researcher in visual perception and cognitive psychology

Our brain functions as a highly creative ‘camera obscura’ – the forerunner of the modern photographic camera, named from the Latin for dark room.
Amazing Visual Illusions: Trick Your Mind and Feast Your Eyes (2011).

Tori Amos photo

“So if I die today, I'll be the happy phantom,
And I'll go chasing the nuns out in the yard,
…And the atrocities of school I can forgive:
The happy phantom has no right to bitch.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

"Happy Phantom".
Songs

Related topics