Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Thomas Carlyle (4 December 1795 – 5 February 1881) was a Scottish philosopher satirical writer essayist historian and teacher during the Victorian era. He brought a trenchant style to his social and political criticism and a complex literary style to works such as The French Revolution: A History (1837).