"Poetaster" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Richmond Hill, why so called I never could discover, for it is neither very highly picturesque, nor very highly poetical, although Dolby's Tavern is a most comfortable resting-place for a wearied traveller, at which prose writer or poetaster may find a haven. Attention, good fare, and ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... a general promenade for the citizens of London, during the summer months. The ground was left to the city by Mary and Catherine, daughters of sir William Fines, a Knight of Rhodes, in the reign of Edward the Confessor. Richard Johnson, a poetaster of the sixteenth century, published in 1607, The Pleasant Walkes of Moore-fields. Being the Guift of two Sisters, now beautified, to the continuing fame of this worthy Citty. 4to. black-letter, of which Mr. Gough, (Brit. Topog.) who was ignorant of the above, notices an impression ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... Ariosto and Tasso; as every one who can copies Shakespeare; as the French school copied, or thought they copied, "The Classics," and as a matter of duty used to justify any bold image in their notes, not by its originality, but by its being already in Claudian, or Lucan, or Virgil, or Ovid; as every poetaster, and a great many who were more than poetasters, twenty years ago, used to copy Scott and Byron, and as all poetasters now are copying the very same models as Mr. Smith, and ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... see the continuation of THE WRECKER, when I introduce some New York publishers. . . It's a good scene; the quantities you drink and the really hideous language you are represented as employing may perhaps cause you one tithe of the pain you have inflicted by your silence on, sir, The Poetaster, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they need end in failure except for one reason. The poet or poetaster cannot, now, except by flat lying and laborious forgery of old papers, produce any documentary evidence to prove the AUTHENTICITY of his attempt at imitation. Without documentary evidence of antiquity, no critic can approach the imitation except in a spirit of determined scepticism. He ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... But since they have acted as they have done, we too must be permitted to express our opinion of their merits; and our deliberate judgment is, that the weakest inanity ever perpetrated in rhyme by the vilest poetaster of any former generation, becomes masculine verse when contrasted with the nauseous pulings of Mr Patmore's muse. Indeed, we question whether the strains of any poetaster can be considered vile, when brought into comparison with this gentleman's verses. His silly and conceited rhapsodies rather ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... Leek! O Poetaster! That in Milan didst buckle on thy wreath Composed of salad, sausage, and ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... to ask what literary sincerity—what value for art and letters—lived in Swinburne, who hailed a certain old friend, in a dedication, as "poet and painter" when he was pleased with him, and declared him "poetaster and dauber" when something in that dead man's posthumous autobiography offended his own self-love; when, I say, criticism finds itself called upon, amid its admiration, to do such scavenger work, it loses heart as well as the clue, and would gladly go out into the free air ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... conspirator. At length the King, who had been missing, reappears, resumes his power, and rewards the faithful defender of his rights. A reader who should judge only by internal evidence would have no hesitation in pronouncing that the play was written by some Pittite poetaster at the time of the rejoicings for the recovery of George ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... more properly required: seeing that it pleased my indolence to be poetical where I was not sure of literal accuracy, and (I may add) it rejoiced me to induce a certain undermaster to suspect and sometimes to accuse this small poetaster of having "cribbed" his metrical version from some unknown collection of poems: however, he had always to be satisfied with my assurance as to authenticity, for he was sure to be baffled in ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... acquired more and more of a dramatic nature, being divided sometimes between two and three speakers, and less resembling formal prologues than those Inductions of which the early dramatists, and especially Ben Jonson, seem to have been so unreasonably fond. The prologue to "The Poetaster" is spoken, in part, by Envy "rising in the midst of the stage," and, in part, by an official representative of the dramatist. So, the prologue to Shakespeare's Second Part of "King Henry IV." is delivered by Rumour, "painted full of tongues;" a like ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... me to school; accordingly he took a tutor for me,—a simple-hearted, gentle, kind man, who possessed a vast store of learning rather curious than useful. He was a tolerable, and at least an enthusiastic antiquarian, a more than tolerable poetaster; and he had a prodigious budget full of old ballads and songs, which he loved better to teach and I to learn, than all the 'Latin, Greek, geography, astronomy, and the use of the globes,' which my poor father had so sedulously ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... persons described. He had the audacity to declare that the initials were selected at random. If so, a marvellous coincidence made nearly every pair of letters correspond to the name and surname of some contemporary poetaster. The classification was rather vague, but seems to ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... is quite 'de trop.' You will see by the enclosed prefatory Notice what I have done in the matter, as little as I could in doing what was to be done. My own Copy is full of improvements. Yes, for any Poetaster may improve three-fourths of the careless old Fellow's Verse: but it would puzzle a Poet to improve the better part. I think that Crabbe differs from Pope in this thing for one: that he aims at Truth, not at Wit, in his Epigram. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... russet thatch, and the blue smoke arose from the earliest chimney. "Every cottage there shall be a bonfire, because it has cast off allegiance to me. The whole race of Darling will be at my mercy—the pompous old Admiral, who refused to call on me till his idiot of a son persuaded him—that wretched poetaster, who reduced me to the ignominy of reading his own rubbish to him—and the haughty young woman that worships a savage who has treated me with insult. I have them all now in the hollow of my hand, and a thorough ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... sound to the word. It is like a piece of dead wood in a tree, and is better lopped off. Nor does the use of "bully" prove a wholesome respect for the past. It is true that our Elizabethans used this adjective in the sense of great or noble. "Come," writes Ben Jonson in "The Poetaster," "I love bully Horace." {*} But in England the word was never of universal application, and was sternly reserved for poets, kings, and heroes. In modern America there is nothing that may not be "bully" if it meet with approval. "A bully place," "a bully ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... license in poetry, it would at first sight seem difficult to single out any one bard as the possessor of ideas and modes of expression so unique and original that the overworked adjective "different" is merited. Every poetaster of the modern school claims to be "different," and bases his claim to celebrity upon this "difference"; an effect usually achieved by the adoption of a harsh, amorphous style, and a tone of analytical, introspective subjectivity so individual that all the common ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a place in the administration of the forest department, worth twelve thousand livres in the year—besides a present, in ready money, of one hundred napoleons d'or. Another poetaster, Barre, who has served and sung the chiefs of all former factions, received, for an ode of forty lines on Bonaparte's birthday, an office at Milan, worth twenty thousand livres in the year—and one hundred napoleons d'or for his ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... the rhymer, the Chancellor went to Pimlico in search of the clerical poetaster, and found ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson |
