Quotes About Wordsworth

I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

No! I was not at all disappointed in Wordsworth, although perhaps I should not have singled him from the multitude as a great man. There is a reserve even in his countenance, which does not lighten as Landor's does, whom I saw the same evening. His eyes have more meekness than brilliancy; and in his slow even articulation there is rather the solemnity and calmness of truth itself, than the animation and energy of those who seek for it.

Wordsworth is a philosophical and Christian poet, with depths in his soul to which poor Byron could never reach.

In this they have the support of Blake, a man so sensitive to any trace of "Natural Religion" that he is said to have blamed some verses of Wordsworth's for a bowel complaint which almost killed him.

The lines on Rugby Chapel…I wish I could remember some of them now, but English Literature stopped at Wordsworth when I was up at Oxford, and somehow one doesn't remember things so well that one read since.

Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force: But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power?

Children were idealized by Wordsworth and un-idealized by Freud. Marx was the Wordsworth of the proletariat; its Freud is still to come.

To condemn Wordsworth for not writing verse of political and social protest, or for having forsaken the revolution, is to cross the final divide between academic arrogance and moral smugness.

She glanced with satisfaction at the neat swath behind her. The grass lay crisply cut and smelled like a creek bank. The course of English Literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower, she thought.

The course of English Literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower.

The course of English Literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower, she thought.

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

Only in the late eighteenth century, with Burke and his theory of the sublime, Wordsworth and his mountains, Rousseau and his thoughts on Nature, did any sense of the romantic appeal of such wilderness areas begin in Europe. But having discovered such a sensibility ourselves, there has always been a reluctance to ascribe it to any other culture, let alone one which might have come to it before us.

And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes.   —WORDSWORTH

I liked being around other people during the day, and I was relieved to be alone late at night; it was the latter that made the former possible. In fact, setting up my nest often made me think of a Wordsworth phrase I'd learned in English class as a high school junior: emotion recollected in tranquillity.

There is a comfort in the strength of love; 'Twill make a thing endurable, which else Would overset the brain, or break the heart. - Michael: A Pastoral Poem

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

With Wordsworth, indeed, the light of revelation did not fall upon human beings so unbrokenly as upon the face of the earth. He knew the birds of the countryside better than the old men, and the flowers far better than the children.