#wordsworth

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind. ↗

— J. M. Coetzee

#case #comes #culture #imitation #immediately

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills When all at once I saw a crowd A host of golden daffodils Beside the lake beneath the trees Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. ↗

— William Wordsworth

#nature #wordsworth #nature

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth. ↗

— Philip Larkin

#me #were #wordsworth

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats. ↗

— Irving Layton

#best #genius #i #i am #keats

If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others. ↗

— Andrew Motion

#admire #connect #general #i #keats

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact. ↗

— Walter Pater

#artifice #assertion #fact #him #life

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he'd replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he'd kept that job? ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#robert-browning #romantic-poetry #saul-bellow #time-magazine #whittaker-chambers