Word: wordsworth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...avows that not only does he not pity sick people, but he hates them"), was another devoted friend. Percy Bysshe Shelley makes a brief appearance ("His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with"), and there is one glorious occasion when Lamb "dined in Parnassus, with Wordsworth, Coleridge, [Samuel] Rogers and Tom Moore-half the Poetry of England constellated and clustered." Coleridge, "in his finest vein," stole "all the talk," and "I am sure not one there but was content to be nothing but a listener...
...difficulty with Lamb is to see him whole. Some see only the mischievous little drunkard who "taught one little girl to say the Lord's Prayer backwards," tweaked William Wordsworth's nose and addressed him as, "You rascally old Lake poet!" Some see him as an overelaborate, rather cute stylist; others brush aside what they feel are merely trappings and hail Lamb as one of the kindest, most generous men that ever lived. Editor Matthews manages to include all these Lambs in his selection and to write what is probably the truest, briefest epitaph: "His friends loved...
...Marvell and Blake was poetically barren." The two greats of the period, Dryden and Pope, he mercilessly unwigs: "[Dryden] earned the doubtful glory of having found English poetry brick and left it marble-native brick, imported marble." And Pope was a "sedulous ape." The 19th century fares little better. Wordsworth, according to Graves, "disowned and betrayed his Muse. Tennyson never had one, except Arthur Hallam, and a Muse does not wear whiskers...
...Poetry," said William Wordsworth, "has never brought in enough to buy shoestrings." Neither has Poetry (circ...
...Wordsworth failed when his poetry became too obviously philosophic, as have other poets since the invention of the printing press, Muir said...