Matthew Arnold Quotes on Literature
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I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is.
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Sanity - that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
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Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease.
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Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear - And struck his finger on the place, And said - Thou ailest here, and here.
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Wordsworth has gone from us - and ye, Ah, may ye feel his voice as we! He too upon a wintry clime Had fallen - on this iron time Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears.
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The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author:-that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble.
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The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
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For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
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The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay.
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The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
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Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
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The crown of literature is poetry.