Quotes About Dryden

Railing in other men may be a crime, But ought to pass for mere instinct in him: Instinct he follows and no further knows, For to write verse with him is to transprose.

Be thou the first true merit to befriend; His praise is lost, who stays till all commend. Short is the date, alas, of modern rhymes, And 'tis but just to let 'em live betimes. No longer now that golden age appears, When patriarch wits surviv'd a thousand years: Now length of Fame (our second life) is lost, And bare threescore is all ev'n that can boast; Our sons their fathers' failing language see, And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.

Maria Edgeworth grumbled against vandals who ruined immortal works by quoting the life out of them. "How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets." Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, scissored, patched, and frayed.

Thoughts cannot form themselves in words so horrid As can express my guilt.

T' abhor the makers, and their laws approve,Is to hate traitors and the treason love.

His tribe were God Almighty's gentlemen.

Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense, But good men starve for want of impudence.

I trade both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native language.

In poetry, she was familiar with names as late as Dryden, and had once been seduced into reading "The Rape of the Lock;

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.

In the next revolution of taste it is possible that poets may turn to the study of Dryden. He remains one of those who have set standards for English verse which it is desperate to ignore.

Oh, my goodness, Lord Dryden. You should have seen your face when you said the word work. It's not counted among the deadly sins, you know.

His tribe were God Almighty's gentlemen.

But far more numerous was the herd of stfch, Who think too little, and who talk too much.

The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre.

It was May of my senior year at Leighton Gage and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we sat in an air-conditioned hourglass and savored our own total incomprehension as an assistant professor charted the poems of Dryden, Lovelace, Fanshawe and Suckling. They were all so incomparably dead, the Penguin poets, and we loved them because their lines meant less to us than the dark side of the moon.

Yet if a Poem have a Genius, it will force its own reception in the World.

Freedom which in no other land will thrive, Freedom an English subject's sole prerogative.

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.