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accept achievement activity ęsthetic appears argument artist attitude beauty become beginning believe Butler called Coleridge common complete comprehension consciousness criticism deal death definite desire effort element emotion English essay essential existence experience express eyes fact feel follow genius give hand Hardy heart human idea ideal imagination important instance interest Keats kind knowledge language least less letters lines literary literature living look lost matter means merely method mind moment moral nature never novel object particular passed perhaps philosophic poem poet poetic poetry precisely present principles produce prose question reason regard seek seems sense Shakespeare soul spirit stand strange Tchehov tell things thought true truth turn unity universe values verse vision volume whole wise writer written
Popular passages
Page 62 - I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,— the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Page 150 - purge off, Benign, if so it please thee, my mind's film.' 'None can usurp this height,' returned that shade, 'But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest.
Page 59 - I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
Page 69 - Hyperion" — there were too many Miltonic inversions in it — Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or, rather, artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up.
Page 189 - A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. At least I have found that where the subject is taken immediately from the author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power.
Page 45 - I KNOW that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above ; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love ; My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan's poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight...
Page 75 - By an immortal sickness which kills not ; It works a constant change, which happy death Can put no end to ; deathwards progressing To no death...
Page 125 - We stood by a pond that winter day, And the sun was white, as though chidden of God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod; — They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Page 58 - But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling 'inscape' is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.
Page 75 - The lily and the snow ; and beyond these I must not think now, though I saw that face. But for her eyes I should have fled away ; They held me back with a benignant light, Soft, mitigated by divinest lids Half-clos'd, and visionless entire they seem'd Of all external things...
Bibliographic information
| Title | Aspects of Literature |
| Author | John Middleton Murry |
| Publisher | W. Collins sons & Company Limited, 1920 |
| Original from | the University of California |
| Digitized | 1 Apr 2008 |
| Length | 203 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |