Edward Young's "Conjectures on Original Composition"

Forside
F. C. Stechert Company, Incorporated, 1917 - 127 sider

Inni boken

Andre utgaver - Vis alle

Vanlige uttrykk og setninger

Populære avsnitt

Side 107 - He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul, All the images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them, not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too.
Side 96 - ... apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned Ancients both in Poetry and all good Oratory.
Side 82 - Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend, And rise to faults true critics dare not mend; From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art, Which, without passing thro' the judgment, gains The heart, and all its end at once attains.
Side 96 - THE measure is English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin — rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre...
Side 94 - But as he is convinced that the fashion of moralizing in verse, has been carried 'too far^ and as he looks upon invention and imagination to be the chief faculties of a poet...
Side 88 - It furnishes art with all her materials, and without it judgment itself can at best but " steal wisely : " for art is only like a prudent steward that lives on managing the riches of nature.' Whatever praises may be given to works of judgment, there is not even a single beauty in them to which the invention...
Side 96 - This neglect then of rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming.
Side 78 - In short, our souls are at present delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing delusion, and we •walk about like the enchanted hero in a romance, who sees beautiful castles, woods, and meadows; and at the same time hears the warbling of birds, and the purling of streams; but, upon the finishing of some secret spell, the fantastic scene breaks up, and the disconsolate knight finds himself on a barren heath, or in a solitary desert.
Side 107 - All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned ; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.
Side 116 - Of genius there are two species, an earlier and a later; or call them infantine and adult. An adult genius comes out of nature's hand, as Pallas out of Jove's head, at full growth and mature: Shakespeare's genius was of this kind: on the contrary, Swift stumbled at the threshold, and set out for distinction on feeble knees.

Bibliografisk informasjon