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Tag Archives: Ralph Waldo Emerson
“[My ambition is to] give something to our literature which will be our own.” — Walt Whitman
“I like to think that eventually he will shame us into becoming Americans again.” — Guy Davenport on Walt Whitman Whitman is the organizing principle behind my review of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue. Bob Dylan quotes Whitman all the … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Algernon Charles Swinburne, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Camille Paglia, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Frank O'Hara, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, Hart Crane, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Baldwin, Michael Schmidt, Oscar Wilde, poetry, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams
5 Comments
“Tennyson’s rank is too well fixed and we love him too much.” — Oscar Wilde
He was not only a minor Virgil, he is also with Virgil as Dante saw him, a Virgil among the Shades, the saddest of all English poets. – T.S. Eliot It’s Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s birthday, born on August 6, 1809. … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged A.S. Byatt, Camille Paglia, Dorothy Parker, Ellen Terry, England, Ezra Pound, George Orwell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, Ireland, Jeanette Winterson, L.M. Montgomery, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin, poetry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ralph Waldo Emerson, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden
11 Comments
“I could readily see in Emerson”
I could readily see in Emerson … the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions. — Herman Melville
LM Montgomery on Washington Irving vs. Emerson
“What a difference there is between Emerson and Irving … Emerson had the greater intellect, Irving the greater heart. But for my own part, I go in for the heart.”
LM Montgomery on Emerson
“To be interested in Emerson you must get right into the groove of his thought and keep steadily on it. Then you can enjoy him. There can be no skipping or culling, if you want to get at his meaning. … Continue reading
In Debt
When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, “Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies, and brought them into life.” — Emerson, “Quotation and Originality”
Bad Times
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Conduct of Life”
Vulgar Mistake
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Words to live by
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. — Ralph Waldo Emerson