Isn't she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying, concealing, flipping, plagiarising, misquoting and being as clever a crooked literary publicist as ever.
Dylan Thomas (1914-53) on Dame Edith Sitwell |
It is a better thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet. So back to the shop, Mr John. Back to plaster, pills and ointment boxes.
J. G. Lockhart in Blackwood's Magazine (1818), on John Keats' poetry |
It is long, yet vigorous, like the penis of a jackass.
Revd Sydney Smith (1771-1845) on the writings of Henry Peter Brougham (1778-1868) |
It is not surprising to learn that Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl: what would be utterly unbelievable would be his having succeeded in stabbing anyone else.
George Bernard Shaw on Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) |
It is written by a man with a diseased mind and soul so black that he would even obscure the darkness of hell.
Senator Reed Smoot on James Joyce (1882-1941) |
Jane Austen's books, too are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
Mark Twain (1835-1910) on Jane Austen (1775-1817) |
Jo Davies goes wobbling with his arse out behind as though he were about to make everyone he meets a wall to piss against.
John Manningham, English diarist, on Sir John Davies (1569-1626), English poet and attorney-general |
Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a riband to stick in his coat.
Robert Browning (1812-1889) on William Wordsworth (1770-1850) |
Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.
George Orwell (1903-50) on Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) |
Lawrence is in a long line of people, beginning with Heraclitus and ending with Hitler, whose ruling motive is hatred derived from megalomania, and I am sorry to see that I was once so far out in estimating him.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) on D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) |
Let simple Wordsworth chime his childish verse, and brother Coleridge lull the babe at nurse.
Lord Byron (1788-1824) |
Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, because of the sacredness of her duties at home.
Robert Southey (1774-1843) on Charlotte Bronte (1816-55) |
Living almost always among intellectuals, she preserved to the age of fifty-six that contempt for ideas which is normal among boys and girls of fifteen.
Odell Sheperd, American writer, on Louisa May Alcott (1832-88) |
Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.
Van Wyck Brooks, American critic, on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82) |
Mad, bad and dangerous to know.
Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), British aristocrat and writer, on Lord Byron |
Master, mammoth, mumbler.
Robert Lowell (1917-77) on Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) |
Monsieur Zola is determined to show that if he has not genius he can at least be dull.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) on Emile Zola (1840-1902) |
Mr Eliot is at times an excellent poet and has arrived at the supreme Eminence among English critics largely through disguising himself as a corpse.
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) on T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) |
Mr Kipling ... stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.
Dylan Thomas (1914-53), Welsh poet, on Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) |
Mr Lawrence looked like a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden ... he looked as if he had just returned from spending an uncomfortable night in a very dark cave.
Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964), British author and poet, on D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) |
