/lit/ - Literature

>>10562352
>Capote thinking he can in any way compete with BASED KEROUAC

>>10562352
Borges said he couldn't stand more than the first 80 pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

That's a great picture of Bolano.

>>10562352
H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw: “An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”

>>10562352
>faulker calling twain a fourth-rate hack top kek

Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri.
“A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.”

There's a website full of these, /thread

>>10562687
URL pls?
I used to have one in Spanish ('troya literaria'), which also had lots of praising between authors and fun trivia, but the faggot who run the blog one day decided he should delete everything and only post his awful poems.

>>10562366
The Road is the dullest American classic I've ever attempted.

>>10562579
>reading it in braile

his opinion is irrelevant

>>10562846
>http://flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history
my guess

Those polemics about Lope de Vega and Góngora.

Lope even responded to his accusers in verse.

>>10562352
dosto

>>10562857
he's right though

>>10562870
huh

>>10562856
On the Road = Kerouac. The Road = McCarthy. Which one is it?

>>10562952
he read neither, he's just a contrarian faggot

>My dick is bigger.

GRR Martin on JK Rowling.

>>10563011
Such unsubstatiated boasting.

>>10563011
She's got pages tho. GRR Ain't got pages

>>10563011
HP works pretty well as a consistent children's series. By the time you finish them you're 14 and ready to move on to other better things. Gurm is too infantile and dull for any self respecting adult and too edgy and grimdark and overlong for children.

>>10563147
So it's for adolescents.

>>10562687
Is that really an insult? Sounds like a pretty cool description to me.

>>10563152
Gurm? I guess. Thing is, books for teenagers are garbage. There is a sense of wonder and magic in children's books, I found myself reading Wind in the Willows and feeling giddy and filled with joy. I would never touch the shit directed at my adolescent self again.

>>10562905
No, he is not

I don't get that jab at GGM by Bolaño. What is it supposed to mean?

>>10562687
>implying this was an insult
You can't take N's words out of context

>>10562952
He mentioned it was a classic, so obviously not the one promoted on Oprah

>dostoyevksy is shit, tolstoy is KANG
-norm macdonald

>>10563011
>"I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the downfall of Sauron, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace and justice and prosperity would become discontented and restless - while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors - like Denethor or worse. I found that even so there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow - but it would be just that. Not worth doing."

Tolkien on GRR Martin

Nabokov on

>“It is a shame he [Franz Hellens] is read less than that awful Monsieur Camus.”
>“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style”
> “I dislike intensely The Karamazov Brothers and the ghastly Crime and Punishment“
>“I detest Resurrection, I detest The Kreutzer Sonata … War and Peace, though a little too long, is a rollicking historical novel”, though basically written for children

>>10563881
he's mad that Marquez wasn't a promiscuous mexican left wing edgelord who never showered

its why Bolano doesn't like Pynchon or Delillo either

>>10564163
he did like em though and he liked ggm early stuff

>>10564192
"Mmmm I prefer his early work."

token pseud

>Homer is a world; Virgil, a style.

- Mark Van Doren

>Homer's poems were writ from a free fury, an absolute and full soul; Virgil's out of a courtly, laborious, and altogether imitatory spirit: not a simile he hath but is Homer's; not an invention, person, or disposition but is wholly or originally built upon Homerical foundations, and in many places hath the very words Homer useth; ... all Homer's books are such as have been precedents ever since of all sorts of poems; imitating none, nor ever worthily imitated of any.

— George Chapman

>>10564141
Nabokov had a lot of funny opinions.

Brecht: A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me.

Camus: Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me. Awful.

Chesterton: A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people.

Crime and Punishment: Dislike it intensely. Ghastly rigmarole.

Faulkner: Writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion.

Ezra Pound: Definitely second-rate. A total fake. A venerable fraud.

>>10562579
Source?
He said it was one of the greatest works of literature ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmlVaFru8Ss
>>10562864
You sure it wasn't Quevedo and Góngora?

>>10564339
Those read like Trump tweets. Maybe with richer vocabulary, but the same style of short shit throwing.

>>10564364
He didn't write them like that, clueless anons just keep reposting a summary

>>10564339
His critique of Faulkner is honestly so shit. Faulkner was a far better prose stylist than he.

>>10562579
Borge said that Federico García Lorca
had been lucky to have been assassinated. It did wonders for his career as a poet.

>>10564327
I mean, Virgil's dying wish was that The Aeneid be burned

>>10564125
Based.

>>10564163
You’re an idiot. Bolaño thought magical realism was retarded

>>10564474
>than he
jesu cristo, the absolute state of this board

>>10564578
English is not my first language, and as far as I'm concerned, that's gramatically correct.

>>10564780
It's archaic grammar, but frankly, who cares.

>>10562352
>literal who writters attacking people better then them
Wells,Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bishop are tards

>>10564163
Tbqh that's a good reason to be mad at someone, if you don't think so maybe this board isn't for you sweetie
I also find nearly impossible Bolaño didn't like the Pynissimvs, they have very similar preocupations and themes, Bolaño is just edgier because he was a latin-american and we're naturally angry at anything from the northern hemisphere.

>>10564818
Woolf eventually complimented Joyce in her diaries. Her initial response to Ulysses was probably due to intense butthurt because some irish decadent middle-class cunt beat her aristocratic ass at her own game before she even tried. She was also a great writer, unlike Vladimir "u just don get it breh" Nabokov, who considered himself the only person to ever get literature while writing the academicist equivalent of purple prose.

>>10563881
GGM liked to suck communists' dicks from Castro or religious ones like the Pope.

>>10564125

>>10564478
Well Borges was a hack and FGL was -- and will always be -- the better poet

>>10564163
I've never heard him say anything bad about Pynchon or DeLillo. Also, "left wing" does not carry the same connotation in the US than in the rest of the world.

>>10564780
Not him; but i think you were supposed to use, well, him

>>10564192
yah, he recommended his short stories, but thought he had a tendency to floriture.

>>10564867
Joyce and Woolf were from a pretty similar social milieu

>>10564848
Pynissimvs. what's that? newfag here

>No — no — don't quote that man! he's the fellow who thinks he must be a big man because he lives in a big country

Carlyle on Whitman

>>10564929
The latin spelling of Pynchmeister

>>10564906
>His critique of Faulkner is honestly so shit. Faulkner was a far better prose stylist than he. (was)

That's how I was taught. My English teacher got pretty butthurt about us using him instead of he in that type of situation, actually.

>>10565163

You can use either; it just depends what underlying structure you wish to imply.

"Better than he" is, as already pointed out, essentially short for "better than he was".

"Better than him" is comparing the two writers as objects, not as subjects.

"Faulkner was a better prose stylist than him" - treating Nabokov-the-prose-stylist as a passive lump, basically a complicated noun.

>>10564867

Many writers are poor judges of other writers.

Oscar Wilde said something quite perceptive about this, something like "artists are blinded by the dust thrown up by their own chariot wheels, and cannot be expected to see any other chariot".

>>10562352
"Camus is a hack"
-Me

>>10562856
>attempted
Key word

>>10565246
True. Also they're petty and art is competitive.

>>10565253

"The prettiest I ever saw Virginia Woolf was in 1941. She was in something long and flowing... the river Ouse."
- Me

>>10564163
>he's mad that Marquez wasn't a promiscuous mexican left wing edgelord who never showered
wasn't he buds with Fidel Castro, among other leftists/communists

>>10565975
Yes, he was Castro's buddie.

>>10564339
he's right about pound

>>10564339
“Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books." That, for instance, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice," or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written "Dr. Zhivago," or Faulkner's corn-cobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces" or at least what journalists term "great books," is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's "Ulysses"; Kafka's "Transformation"; Bely's "St. Petersburg," and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, "In Search of Lost Time.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

>>10564911
They definitely weren't, Virgina Woolf's dad was from old nobility while Joyce's family was a decadent middle class family with a brief stint of comfort thanks to Joyce's dad heritage and some position in the Parnell administration, but he lost it all when Parnell got busted by the queen's priests.

>>10563881
He's saying marquez was a social climbing poser and not a guy of the people

>>10566371
I'm not a fan of either author but what the fuck was even wrong with Fitzgerald, nigga look like David Bowie went through a soft-satanist phase

>>10566379
Was an alcoholic full time

>>10566379
fuck, I thought that was his wife zelda

>>10566417
So your bride cheats on you with a pilot, take her back? When she goes insane years later, pay for her sanitarium care?

Gore Vidal was great at talking shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQdApeYOv-A

>>10566465
I wouldn't accept back a cheating whore desu

>>10566371
what the fuck is this hairstyle, lmao

>>10566465
I meant the photo, i thought that was zelda, looks very feminine

>>10564339
WHY I DO I FIND GHASTLY RIGMAROLE SO FUNNY

>>10566542
>rigmarole
>dfw pic
the joke tells itself

>>10562856
seconded.

still baffled as to how the road is considered a classic? can some1 pls explain this to me i jus don't see any real literary value in this novel

>>10567411
it has cultural value. i think it's worth reading if you want to understand the beatniks.

>>10567411
https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-291/lecture-8

>>10566337
It just occurred to me that Nabakov has the same elitist, contrarian mentality as /lit/ does: bashing great and influential works by the truckload and only praising a few "elite masterpieces" as even worth five seconds of your time at best.

>>10567565
No he was right. You're just butthurt about having shit taste

>>10567614
You're right. There are only three and a half books worth reading in the past century.

>>10565246
>Many writers are poor judges of other writers.
It's kind of implicit in the fact that they're artists.

>>10564141
His opinion on Conrad has always bothered me, in a way because I've always known he was right. Conrad is still my favorite author, though.
On a related note, I once picked up a novel by Conrad in a bookshop, and read a preface which was made up of opinions from his contemporaries on his writing, including Hemingway etc. I was quite shocked to read that the consensus on him while he was writing was essentially that he was a hack.

>>10567468
That's cool and everything but it doesn't tell me why the road has literary value.

>>10567669
Calvino liked him.

>>10567685
Hemingway ultimately decided he liked him as well, despite his friends trying to convince him he was bad.

>>10566337
He's completely right about Dreiser and Gorky, no one reads those save for /leftypol/ers and masochists. The notion that Pasternak is worthless as a novelist is also something only amerimutts would dipsute.

Who is right:

>>10562352
>Kerouac
>Garcia

>>10562579
>Garcia again

>>10562624
>Shaw

>>10562629
>Twain (and I love Faulkner)

>>10562687
>Dante

>>10563011
>GRRM

>>10564111
>both right and wrong

>>10564125
>Austen

>>10564141
>Nabokov is wrong on everything

>>10564327
>Both wrong

>>10564339
>still wrong, but a great writer

>>10564932
>Whitman

>>10565253
>Camus

>>10565277
>(you)

>>10566337
>Nabokov is still wrong, until the last sentence

>>10566371
>Hemingway

>>10566472
>Gore Vidal is wrong by default

>>10566484
>Tolstoy

>>10568302
he's right about everyone he mentions in that first sentence except Thomas Mann (obviously) and arguably Tagore, who he most likely condemns for the same reasons as Conrad/Tolstoy - for not appearing complex enough

>>10562846
Didn't the author of La Troya die/kill himself?

>>10566337
>Thomas Mann
>not a genius

reee

>>10566337
I still don't get why he disliked Faulkner.

>>10568381
Bc he didnt get american lit. Plain and simple. Part of that whole european aristocracy bullshit.

>>10562857
He didn't know Braille, Kodama read to him aloud. Also, Borges didn't like anything from the boom.

>>10564163
No, on the other hand anon. Bolaño discredited any autenticity of Marquez's political endeavours. In other words he's calling him not a real communist, all of the Infrarrealists writers were marxists.

>>10564141
Nabokov was ultimately a pseud who only could produce nice prose. Wew, his criticisms sure matter.

>>10564130
That's pretty fucked up.

>>10564111
Reminder that Norm just doesn't like being reminded of his gambling problem

Why did stephen paddock do it

>>10563147
Dull?

>>10568603
>>10564903
>>10564848
>>10564573
"Dude, Pynchon and Delillo are SHIT. Read PKD! Far more successful!" - Roberto 'Globalism is bad, m'kay' Bolano

>If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right. At first Fichte and Schelling shine as the heroes of this epoch; to be followed by the man who is quite unworthy even of them, and greatly their inferior in point of talent --- I mean the stupid and clumsy charlatan Hegel.

>>10568749
PKD is better than Delillo and at least as good as the Pyncher, but his life was absolute shit, which I guess caused him to never fully realize his potential (though I think VALIS is a work of someone who did realize his full potential, too bad he died).

>>10564125
I thought this was him being cheeky?

>>10564358
Was gonna post this exactly. If it was a verse or a poem it was Quevedo and Gongora. I think Lope and Quevedo were friends and would shittalk Gongora constantly tho.
Lope was more of a Cervantes rival since Cervantes wanted to be as popular as Lope writing plays.

>>10566337
>corn-cobby chronicles
i laugh every time

fuck faulkner

>>10562352
some of the funniest insults i've seen thrown at another writer/philosopher were by Schopenhauer against Hegel.
Even if you don't like Schopenhauer, or even if you like Hegel, the insults were still funny.

>>10568749
You obviously can't read.
>Dick is the one who, in Ubik, comes closest to capturing the human consciousness or fragments of consciousness in the context of their setting; the correspondence between the story he tells and its structure is more brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo
if it's more brilliant, he thinks Pynchon and Delillo also wrote brilliantly

>>10564478
Why would he say that.

This sort of counts

“All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the “elect” have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so “slow,” so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.” – Mark Twain

>>10562352

Bolaño literally shitted on everything.
I personally love everything he said about Allende's writing.

"Nigger" - H.P Lovecraft on Maya Angelou

>>10566484
based Tolstoy

>>10570797
Isabel Allende? He didn't like her. He said something about her not being a "escritora" but a "escribente" or something like that. Basically, he thought she wasn't a worthy writer.

I wish i could give you the source but i can't remember well where did i hear it It was probably on one o those hour long interviews you can find on youtube.

>>10570920
All his criticism of Allende’s writings is translated into English. It’s obvious to anyone that he thought she was a hack

>From the Playboy interview

Q. Don't you think that if you'd gotten drunk with Isabel Allende and Angeles Mastretta you'd have a different opinion of their books?

Bolano: I don't think so[....] even at my drunkest moments I never lost a certain basic clarity, a sense of style and rhythm, a horror of plagiarism, mediocrity, and silence.

>From On Literateure, The National Literature, and the Rare Consolations of the Writing Life

"To the matter at hand, then. Asked to choose between the frying pan and the fire, I choose Isabel Allende. The glamour of her life as a South American in California, her imitations of Garcia Marquez, her unquestionable courage, the way her writing ranges from the kitsch to the pathetic and reveals her as a kind of Latin American and politically correct version of the author of 'The Valley of the Dolls': all of this, though it may seem hard to believe, makes her work highly superior to the work of born paper-pushers like Skarmeta and Teitelboim.

"In other words: Allende's work is bad, but it's alive; ot's anemic, like lot of Latin Americans, but it's alive. It won't live long, like many sick people, but for now it's alive. And there's always the possibility of a miracle. Who knows? The ghost of Juana Ines de la Cruz could appear to Allende one day and present her with a readying list. Or the ghost of Teresa of Avila. Or all else failing, the ghost of Emilia Pardo Bazan. There's no such hope for the work of Slarmeta and Teitelboim. Even God can't save them. Still, to write--I swear I read it in a Chilean newspaper--that we need to hurry up and give Allende the National Prize before she wins the Nobel is no longer just a ridiculous farce, but proof that the author of such a claim is a world-class idiot."

>>10568591
He liked some of Cortazar stories.

>>10568749
Be honest: are you retarded?

>>10571335
well yeah, he published them. would not be any cortazar without borges.

>>10570920
No, that was Bolaño. He said she was an "escribidora" instead of an "escritora". Sort of like calling her a "writist" instead of a "writer".

>>10564163
There is a passage in Savage Detectives where Bolano says DeLillo is great. I'm not gonna be bothered to go get the quote but you can search it in the search function of the Google book. You actually have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.

>>10568559
>american lit
He did get it. American literature is a joke

>>10564130
>getting BTFO'd this entire universe by a dead man

thats why you dont insult your betters, even after they are gone. grrm is a real life troll trying to make his name be associated with tolkiens by saying ridiculous things and having people talk about it from being so mad and confused

in 1936, Stevens was in Key West visiting a business friend, as he often did in the 1930s. Evidently he and Hemingway had not been getting along. “He came again sort of pleasant like the cholera,” was the latter’s remark in a letter to Sara Murphy (a wealthy American who would later be immortalized by Fitzgerald as Tender is the Night‘s Nicole Diver),

and first I knew of it my nice sister Ura (Ursula) was coming into the house crying because she had been at a cocktail party at which Mr. Stevens had made her cry by telling her forcefully what a sap I was, no man, etc. So I said, this was a week ago, ”All right, that’s the third time we’ve had enough of Mr. Stevens.” So headed out into the rainy past twilight and met Mr. Stevens who was just issuing from the door haveing [sic] just said, I learned later, ”By God I wish I had that Hemingway here now I’d knock him out with a single punch.’

Stevens saw his moment, and swung at Hemingway. But he missed, and Hemingway struck back.

Some important bits of context: Stevens was 56 years old, and worked a day job as an insurance executive. He had the build you’d expect, solid but forgiving. Hemingway was twenty years younger, lean and sun-weathered from recent adventures in bull-fighting-and-African-safaris-and-Carribbean-sailing. When Stevens finally did land “his Sunday punch bam,”very late in the game, he broke his hand on Hemingway’s jaw.

http://therumpus.net/2012/03/saturday-history-stevens-and-hemingway/

>>10571507
He even went as far as legally changing his name so it had another R.

>>10564130
AAAAAAHHHHAAHAHAHA

Bolaño is mediocre

>>10565163
Don't listen to these cretins. You speak better English than they do any other second language, and for whatever it's worth I'm a monolingual American English speaker.

>>10571484
Why is it a joke?

>>10571645
SUCC BIGG FAT DICk

https://books.google.com/books?id=Ws9FDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT39&lpg=PT39&dq=jack+camus&source=bl&ots=OU_DNxdLBq&sig=O7VZucMtaM5vBgGqlxyGZhzgSsQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj2wdPd1urYAhUCF6wKHUaJDG0Q6AEIQTAI#v=onepage&q=jack%20camus&f=false

>>10571645
still better than garcia marquez, though.

>>10571844
Maybe for a contrarian I-love-post-modernism kid. But for all GGM flaws and for many of his bad books, the thing is that One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the greatest books of all time. I would never say that that Gabo guy would be capable of such an achievement, yet I’m glad that he was. There is nothing in Bolaño that compares to that savage book of humanity and poetry. You might not agree with me, but 300 years in the future Bolaño would be known by scholars, while Garcia Marquez would still be read by the general reader with an interest in world literature

>>10565224
How are the writers objects here at all? Maybe it's because I didn't study English but that passive lump thing sounds like nonsense.

We say "better than him" instead of "better than he" for the same reason we are fine with ending sentences with prepositions. It's just how people talk. Language is fluid and changing.

>>10573108
Have you read it yourself? I think it becomes boring after Aureliano Buendía's suicide attempt. Even Borges himself couldn't read past the first 80 pages, he thought it seemed like an elongated anecdote. Critique with which I agree, but I still think it's worth reading, at least for its first half.

>>10574103

I have read it entirely. While I agree that the beginning of the book seem to be more inspired (perhaps because the world was more mythical in the early days and the blood of those early beings was somehow stronger and purer) the rest of it still of great worth.

The loneliness of the dead, the deaths that are waiting inside death itself, the several different types of solitude (of the hateful ones, of the delusional ones, the loneliness of the party-maker bon vivant among hundreds of people, the loneliness of power, the loneliness of those unable to love, the loneliness of those who love too much and don’t find the mirror of their feelings in any place on earth, the loneliness of beauty and the nirvana-like mind, etc, etc) the otherworldly entity of Melquiades, the fate of the Buendía race (and maybe of all human race) sung in the papyrus pages written in Sanskrit: all goes full circle in the end of the book. The society that emerged from the mud and the primeval dew of history will grow and evolve only to start deteriorating and coming back to mud again. Meanwhile, the book is indeed kind of episodic, but I think that GGM managed to carry the sense of the passing of an entire century pretty well.

And an Anon on this very thread posten an interview of Borges where he states that One Hundred Years of Solitude was not only among the greatest books of the last years but also of all time.

Here:

>>10564358

>>10574139
In that Borges interview he says he's not a reader of novels, then proceeds to praise One Hundred Years... I think I'll take his comments with a grain of salt from now on.

>>10571817
Because hes not american. His inferiority complex doesnt allow him to consider anything american as good or worthy of praise, because in doing so, his whole identity and his own sense of self worth would be shattered.

>>10562856
His descriptions of jazz performances are great, he really gets the energy of it across.

The rest of it starts to grate with its "I said this, then anon said that, then we went here and did something, then went somewhere else and did another thing and on the way anon said this and I said that" style

>>10566472
Vidal was a great writer. Shame nobody reads him.

Faulkner took a jab at Hemingway:
>He has never gone out on a limb; has never been known to use a word that might send his reader to the dictionary.

And Hemingway zinged him in return:
>Poor Faulkner. Does he really think that big emotions come from big words?

>>10574789
>>10574789
Hemingway's response only really works if you assume Faulkner is talking about Hemingway's capacity to evoke emotion, even though Faulkner is obviously talking about the intellectual quality of Hem's writing

>When the pope's bull condemning 41 of the 95 theses arrived in Wittenberg, it gave Luther an opportunity for a demonstration: he burned it publicly, to the great delight, naturally, of the university students crowding around him. For good measure he threw in some rescripts, the decretals of Clement VI, the Summa Angelica, and a few books by a colleague who championed the pope, Johann von Eck. "It is an old custom," said Luther, "to burn bad books."

Pound on Swinburne:

>Mr. Swinburne is famed or infamed for having used a great many which express nothing but ‘colour’ or ‘splendour’. It has been said that he used the same adjectives to describe a woman and a sunset.

Pound on Wordsworth:

>Wordsworth got rid of a lot of trimmings, but there are vast stretches of deadness in his writing. Artists are the antennae of the race. Wordsworth vibrates to a very limited range of stimuli, and he was not conscious of the full problem of writing.

Hunt on Keats:

>Keats never beheld an oak tree without seeing a dryad

Macaulay on Boswell:

>Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.