Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
He was made the vehicle of the effusions of worthless versifiers, and he was forced to cry out, "Woe is me! even the copyist fixes his verses upon me, and every one bestows on me his silly trifles." The application of these verses was alike appropriate to the life of the Pope, or to the reigns of Alexander VI., Julius II., and the one just beginning. "Me miserum!
Stomach-turned at the fat niggers dressed up like Turks and Algerians and made to lend an "air" to the haunt of the nocturnal belly dancers in the Rue Pigalle, sickened at the stupid lewdities of the Rue Biot, disgusted at the brassy harlotries of the Lapin Agil', come with me into that auberge of the Avenue Trudaine where are banned catch-coin stratagems, fleshly pyrotechnics, that little refuge whose wall gives forth the tableau of Salis, he of the Niagaran whiskers and the old Chat Noir, strangling the adolescent versifiers of Montmartre, the tableau of the crimson rose of Poetry blossoming from out their strangling pools of blood.
The second is a poem of greater length, which I have chosen not only for the present purpose, but likewise as a striking example and illustration of an assertion hazarded in a former page of these sketches namely, that the characteristic fault of our elder poets is the reverse of that, which distinguishes too many of our more recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language; the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts.
But poetry do you know how Vaughn Marlow makes his living? teaching in a boys' cramming-joint down in Pennsylvania, and of all private little hells such a billet is the limit. I wouldn't trade places with him if he had fifty years of life before him. And yet his work stands out from the ruck of the contemporary versifiers as a balas ruby among carrots. And the reviews he gets!
But with what unuttered and unutterable scorn the youthful victims of the Royal pairing accepted the newspaper-assurances of the devoted tenderness they entertained for each other! With what wearied impatience both prince and princess received the 'Wedding Odes' and 'Epithalamiums, written by first-class and no-class versifiers for the occasion!
And how much do you versifiers know of all those arts and sciences you refer to as if you were as familiar with them as a cobbler is with his wax and lapstone? Enough not to make too many mistakes. The best way is to ask some expert before one risks himself very far in illustrations from a branch he does not know much about.
As Tennyson said in 1890, "So I, an old man, who get a poem or poems every day, might cast a casual glance at a book, and seeing something which I could not scan or understand, might possibly decide against the book without further consideration." As a rule, the said books are worthless. The number of versifiers makes it hard, indeed, for the poet to win recognition.
Here philosophy was ardently pursued, the works of Plato and his great rivals being diligently studied, while in a later age the innovation of Neoplatonism was abundantly debated and taught. A new school of poetry also arose, most of its followers being mechanical versifiers, though the idyllic poets of Sicily sought these favoring halls.
Any one who reads the Lives of the English Poets carefully, will be impressed with two facts: first, that the author had an acquaintance with the early versifiers of Great Britain, which was quite extraordinary, and which can hardly be found at fault by our modern knowledge; while, secondly, that he shows a sudden and unaccountable ignorance of his immediate contemporaries of the younger school.
"The nutmeg boughs in the Garden of Love," droop over the fair-haired Teutonic maiden in her home amid German pine-forests, and she gathers "the scented fruit of gold," as a worthy gage d'amour for her stalwart Saxon lover, with that picturesque incongruity of poetical license permitted to mediæval versifiers.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking