"Line of poetry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Wordsworth's poems; and one of the guests present records how at the end of the visit not a single word had ever passed Wordsworth's lips which could have indicated that he knew his host to have ever written a line of poetry or prose. ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... possessed sometimes display an eloquence which they are incapable of in their normal condition.[4] In China, possessed women, who never composed a line of poetry in their normal lives, utter their thoughts in verse, and are said to give evidence ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... a vacation. BEECHER has several methods by which he prepares his mind to write a sermon: By riding up and down Broadway on the top of a stage; visiting the Academy of Anatomy, or spending a few hours at the Bloomingdale Retreat. Neither HOLMES nor WHITTIER are able to write a line of poetry until they are brought in contact with the blood of freshly-slain animals; while, on the other hand, LONGFELLOW'S only dissipation previous to poetic effort, is a dish of baked beans. FORNEY vexes his gigantic intellect with iced water and tobacco, (of the latter, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... alien subjects than one whose attention, less concentrated, has time to range over diverse fields of study. Readers of Darwin's Life will remember his confession that he had lost all taste for music, art, and literature; that he "could not endure to read a line of poetry" and found Shakespeare "so intolerably dull that it nauseated" him; and finally, that his mind seemed "to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... say that the poet unites thought and feeling and gives them perfect expression. They are not distinct: they become in his hands a new single life, a unity. You cannot separate the emotion from the thought in any great line of poetry. When Wordsworth talks of the "unimaginable touch of time," there is {228} plainly emotion as well as thought and memory in his words: when Shelley cries ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... of the author (the odds are twenty to one about that), but utter inability to grasp the point in question; it is too deep for him, and, especially, too subtle. If you are cruel enough to press him, he will unconsciously betray the fact that he has never felt a line of poetry in his life. He honestly believes that the 'Seven against Thebes' is one of the greatest works that ever were written, just as a child believes the same of the 'Seven Champions of Christendom.' A great wit once observed, when bored by the praises of a ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn |
