United States or Iraq ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The Aeneid was written during the remaining years of his life, but was left unfinished, the poet having designed to give three more years to its elaboration. As is well known, it was saved from destruction and given to the world by the emperor's command, contrary to the poet's dying wish and the express injunctions of his will.
In Shakespeare the dramatic form helps partly to make this more prominent, though the poet's spirit shines forth thus, independently of the mould which it imposes on itself.
Beside the extinguished lamps which the hoofs had confusedly scattered, the fire, arrested by the watercourse, had consumed the grasses that fed it, and there the plains stretched, black and desert as the Phlegroean Field of the Poet's Hell.
While all around me were vigilant, I have not laid me down to sleep even for the luxury of a poet's dream. Like the school boy, I have considered study as study, but action as delight. Nevertheless, whatever I have seen, or heard, or felt, has been treasured in my memory, and brooded over by my thoughts. I now place the result before you, "Sicut meus est mos, Nescio quid meditans nugarum;
In England, people were irritated and disturbed; Lord Chatham exclaimed with the usual exaggeration of his powerful and impassioned genius "Yesterday England could still stand against the world, today there is none so poor as to do her reverence. I borrow the poet's words, my lords, but what his verse expresses is no fiction.
Of course I liked him, and I thought him very handsome and fine, with a full beard cut in the fashion he has always worn it, and with poet's eyes lighting an aquiline profile.
Nine years before the appearance of the 1842 volume of Tennyson's verse the poet's bosom friend, Arthur Hallam, died at an immature age at Vienna, and his death was the subject of much brooding in noble, elegiac verse, written, as was Milton's 'Lycidas, to commemorate the loss of one very dear to the poet.
But you have shunned the worst and most vulgar deceit in civilized life; you have not simulated love. Better that yon poor lady should be, awhile, the sufferer from a harsh truth, than the eternal martyr of a flattering lie! Alas, my Leonard! with the love of the poet's dream are linked only the Graces; with the love of the human heart come the awful Fates!"
As a matter of fact, those who understand poetry strive to develop the germs of another poetry, quickened within them by the poet's poetry; but this glacial audience, so far from attaining to the spirit of the poet, did not even listen to the letter.
That such a meeting as this should have formed so long-remembered an incident in the poet's life will appear, perhaps, equally ridiculous to the philosopher and to the man of the world. The one would have given less, the other would have demanded more.
Word Of The Day