Top 100 Quotes About Wordsworth
#1. Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.
Henry David Thoreau
#2. The course of English Literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower, she thought.
Harper Lee
#3. Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy.
George Gordon Byron
#4. The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth
along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets
have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless.
Katy Lederer
#5. I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.
Aravind Adiga
#6. Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.
William Collins
#7. I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons.
Billy Collins
#8. I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can't be usual to go to your favorite memory only to find someone already there, admiring the view ahead of you.
Jasper Fforde
#9. Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.
Pico Iyer
#10. Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.
-William Wordsworth(Tintern Abbey)
William Wordsworth
#11. 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.
Harold Bloom
#12. That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.
Walter Pater
#13. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.
Andrew Motion
#14. I once tried hawking my own book around the pubs in the hope that, like the Salvation Army, I too could sell to the cerebrally relaxed. It was a disaster. I had beer thrown over me for being a) a nuisance, b) not as good as Wordsworth and c) a nancy for writing poetry in the first place.
Peter Finch
#15. We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
#16. 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.
Geoffrey H. Hartman
#17. 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.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#18. Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.
Oscar Wilde
#19. We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.
Thom Gunn
#20. Wordsworth's particular grace, his charisma, as theologians say, has been granted in equal measure to so very few men since time was
to Plato and who else?
The crucial thing is never what we do, but always what we do right after that. What matters is always the next step!
Robert Musil
#21. Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither. William Wordsworth,
James Hollis
#22. Wordsworth also said that the best part of a person's life is "his little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love." I
Amy Poehler
#23. I kind of got inspired by [William] Wordsworth and [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge - I went the old traditional way of finding inspiration, I guess ...
Eliot Paulina Sumner
#24. Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
Philip Larkin
#25. I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.
J.M. Coetzee
#26. A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts. - WORDSWORTH.
George Eliot
#27. TEN GREATEST ENGLISH POETS Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning. TEN GREATEST ENGLISH ESSAYISTS Bacon, Addison, Steele, Macaulay, Lamb, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray and Matthew Arnold.
Joseph Devlin
#28. I make no apology for writing in nature's age-old and unaging language, of whose images we build our paradises, Broceliande and Brindavan, the Forest of Arden, Xanadu, Shelley's Skies, or even Wordsworth's Grasemere, which can be found on no map.
Kathleen Raine
#30. 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?
Matthew Arnold
#31. In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.
Bertrand Russell
#32. She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W's. When she'd ask him how he liked them, he would say, "Fine. I'm on page ... " and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he'd accomplished that day.
Lorrie Moore
#33. Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.
Philip Larkin
#34. There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
J.M. Coetzee
#35. Later, I came to see that Mr. Dickens and Mr. Wordsworth were thinking of men like me when they wrote their words. But most of all, I believe that Mr. Shakespeare was. Mind you, I cannot always make sense of what he says, but it will come.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#36. There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.
Agnes Repplier
#37. Up up and quit your books' is not an adjuration commonly thought advisable in universities but there are occasions -- as for instance, when studying Wordsworth when it might be advisable.
Joseph Wood Krutch
#38. Perhaps kids really did come into the world trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth had so confidently proclaimed, but they also shit in their pants until they learned better.
Stephen King
#39. The simple Wordsworth ... / Who, both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.
Lord Byron
#40. I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.
Irving Layton
#41. To Wordsworth nature was the nurse; to us, it's the patient.
Robert Hillman
#43. Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride,
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness; that he, who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used; that thought with him
Is in its infancy ...
William Wordsworth
#44. The harvest of a quiet eye, That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
William Wordsworth
#45. The common growth of Mother Earth Suffices me,-her tears, her mirth, Her humblest mirth and tears.
William Wordsworth
#46. My brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion.
William Wordsworth
#49. Ere we had reach'd the wish'd-for place, night fell: We were too late at least by one dark hour,
William Wordsworth
#50. Where are your books? - that light bequeathed
To beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.
William Wordsworth
#51. Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves Of their bad influence, and their good receives.
William Wordsworth
#52. One in whom persuasion and belief
Had ripened into faith, and faith become
A passionate intuition.
William Wordsworth
#54. An injudicious and malignant enemy often serves the cause he means to injure; but a feeble friend never attains that end.
Dorothy Wordsworth
#55. The rainbow comes and goes. Enjoy it while it lasts. Don't be surprised by its departure, and rejoice when it returns.
Anderson Cooper
#56. I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, wherever nature led.
William Wordsworth
#57. Turning, for them who pass, the common dust Of servile opportunity to gold.
William Wordsworth
#58. Tis said, fantastic ocean doth enfold The likeness of whate'er on land is seen.
William Wordsworth
#59. Long as there's a sun that sets, Primroses will have their glory; Long as there are violets, They will have a place in story: There's a flower that shall be mine, 'Tis the little Celandine.
William Wordsworth
#61. Imagination is the means of deep insight and sympathy, the power to conceive and express images removed from normal objective reality.
William Wordsworth
#62. The monumental pomp of age Was with this goodly personage; A stature undepressed in size, Unbent, which rather seemed to rise In open victory o'er the weight Of seventy years, to loftier height.
William Wordsworth
#64. The intellectual power, through words and things, Went sounding on a dim and perilous way!
William Wordsworth
#65. And through the heat of conflict keeps the law In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw.
William Wordsworth
#66. The daisy, by the shadow that it casts, Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.
William Wordsworth
#67. But an old age serene and bright, and lovely as a Lapland night, shall lead thee to thy grave.
William Wordsworth
#68. My gentle Reader, I perceive / How patiently you've waited, / And now I fear that you expect / Some tale will be related. / O Reader! had you in your mind / Such stores as silent thought can bring, / O gentle Reader! you would find / A tale in every thing.
William Wordsworth
#69. Go to the poets, they will speak to thee
More perfectly of purer creatures
William Wordsworth
#72. The earth was all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.
William Wordsworth
#74. A great poet ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings ... to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature.
William Wordsworth
#76. And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.
William Wordsworth
#79. Careless of books, yet having felt the power
Of Nature, by the gentle agency
Of natural objects, led me on to feel
For passions that were not my own, and think
(At random and imperfectly indeed)
On man, the heart of man, and human life.
William Wordsworth
#80. The sightless Milton, with his hair Around his placid temples curled; And Shakespeare at his side,-a freight, If clay could think and mind were weight, For him who bore the world!
William Wordsworth
#81. Upon the highest ridge of that round hill covered with planted oaks, the shafts of the trees show in the light like the columns of a ruin.
Dorothy Wordsworth
#83. I'm not talking about a "show me other walls of this thing" button, I mean a "stumble" button for wallbase.
William Wordsworth
#84. I think one of the dullest things in the world is a letter filled with apologies for not writing sooner.
Dorothy Wordsworth
#86. One interior life in which all beings live with God, themselves are God, existing in the mighty whole, indistinguishable as the cloudless east is from the cloudless west, when all the hemisphere is one cerulean blue.
William Wordsworth
#88. Who fancied what a pretty sight This Rock would be if edged around With living Snowdrops? circlet bright! How glorious to this Orchard ground! Who loved the little Rock, and set
William Wordsworth
#90. We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.
William Wordsworth
#91. How fast has brother followed brother, From sunshine to the sunless land!
William Wordsworth
#93. A cheerful life is what the Muses love, A soaring spirit is their prime delight.
William Wordsworth
#94. What know we of the Blest above but that they sing, and that they love?
William Wordsworth
#95. For by superior energies; more strict affiance in each other; faith more firm in their unhallowed principles, the bad have fairly earned a victory over the weak, the vacillating, inconsistent good.
William Wordsworth
#96. Let beeves and home-bred kine partake The sweets of Burn-mill meadow; The swan on still St. Mary's Lake Float double, swan and shadow!
William Wordsworth
#97. And when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew Soul-animating strains,-alas! too few.
William Wordsworth
#99. Oh for a single hour of that Dundee Who on that day the word of onset gave!
William Wordsworth
#100. Curiously enough, while very small people have a never-failing sense of their own importance, very great ones are often easily disheartened and put out of conceit with themselves.
Elizabeth Wordsworth
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