The Best Poems of the English Language
Metadata
- Author: Unknown
Highlights
Sustained and justified pride of performance is a frequent attribute of the best lyric poetry. — location: 426
Shelley welcomes the “destroyer and preserver” invoked in his own “Ode to the West Wind,” which now powers his spirit (breath) for a final, cosmological voyage. To thus call up0n a prior creation of one’s own is to affirm an authentic poetic election. — location: 432
‘Though much is taken, much abides”: that seems to me the essence of positive inevitability of phrasing. When Ben Jonson remarked bitterly of Shakespeare, “He never blotted a line-would he had blotted many!,” he testified to Shakespeare’s uncanny power of unavoidable rather than predictable phrasing. Tennyson’s Ulysses is overtly Shakespearean throughout his monologue, until in the final lines he begins to sound like Milton’s quite Shakespearean Satan. — location: 470
Longin us tells us that in the experience of the Sublime we apprehend a greatness to which we respond by a desire for identification, so that we will become what we behold. Loftiness is a quality that emanates from the realm of aspiration, from what Wordsworth called a sense of something evermore about to be. — location: 488
Shelley thus inaugurated what would become more an American than an English poetic motif, the fourfold figuration that finally fuses night, death, the mother, and the sea in a sequence of American poets from Walt Whitman though Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and beyond. — location: 534
William Blake is also invoked in this ultimate stanza, since the “vortex of our graves” refers to his conceptual image of the “vortex,” which closes the perceptual gap between subject and object. — location: 597
Strangeness, in fact, arouses wonder when we do not understand: aesthetic imagination when we do. — location: 624
As Barfield intimates, consciousness is to poetry what marble is to sculpture: the material that is being worked. Words are figurations of consciousness: metaphorical of consciousness, the poet’s words invite us to share in a strangeness. — location: 625
The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves. Even Shakespeare cannot make me into Falstaff or Hamlet, but all great poetry asks us to be possessed by it. To possess it by memory is a start, and to augment our consciousness is the goal. The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes. — location: 631