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.
MATTHEW ARNOLDBe neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
More Matthew Arnold Quotes
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For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.
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Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
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Style … is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.
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If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.
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Ah, love, let us be true To one another!
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The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.
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Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.
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Time, so complain’d of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm’d hours.
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The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
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The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.
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Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
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And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.
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Art still has truth. Take refuge there.
MATTHEW ARNOLD