"Poet laureate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... substance with which he worked, indeed, is so good that there would be a difficulty in spoiling it completely; but the prose of the translation in the English Bible, faultless as it is, loses nothing in Bunyan's hands, and if we found these poems in the collected works of a poet laureate, we should consider that a difficult task had been accomplished successfully. Bunyan felt, like the translators of the preceding century, that the text was sacred, that his duty was to give the exact meaning of it, without epithets or ornaments, and thus ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... I could wish had not been there though it is prettily excused afterwards. The next day my Lady Suffolk desired I would write her a patent for appointing Lady Temple poet laureate to the fairies. I was excessively out of order with a pain in my stomach, which I had had for ten days, and was fitter to write verses like a Poet Laureate, than for making one; however, I was going home to dinner alone, and at six I sent her some ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... adventurers in this their adventurous travel, excepting the Stuyvesant manuscript, which gives the substance of a pleasant little heroic poem, written on the occasion by Dominie AEgidius Luyck,[58] who appears to have been the poet laureate of New Amsterdam. This inestimable manuscript assures us that it was a rare spectacle to behold the great Peter and his loyal follower hailing the morning sun, and rejoicing in the clear countenance of Nature, as they pranced it through the pastoral scenes of Bloemen Dael; which in those days ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... as Lord Rector a man of creative genius, like Wordsworth, rather than himself. As Prime Minister he honoured science by selecting Sir John Herschel as Master of the Mint, and literature, by the recommendation of Alfred Tennyson as Poet Laureate. When Sir Walter Scott was creeping back in broken health from Naples to die at Abbotsford it was Lord John who cheered the sad hours of illness in the St. James's Hotel, Jermyn Street, by a delicately worded offer of financial help from the public funds. Leigh Hunt, Christopher North, Sheridan ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... that he had dined on October 12th at the "Devil," with Addison and Dr. Garth, when the good-natured doctor, whom every one loved, stood treat, and there must have been talk worth hearing. In the Apollo chamber the intolerable court odes of Colley Cibber, the poet laureate, used to be solemnly rehearsed with fitting music; and Pope, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... for poetry. Among the best I have ever seen. There are 81 in the list. I did not need them all, but I have knocked down 66 of them; which is a good bag, it seems to me, for a person not in the business. Perhaps a poet laureate could do better, but a poet laureate gets wages, and that is different. When I write poetry I do not get any wages; often I lose money by it. The best word in that list, and the most musical and gurgly, is Woolloomoolloo. It is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... poem is before us in the elegant Boston typography of Ticknor & Field's worthy successors.[31] The poet laureate added little to his fame by his previous dramatic work, "Queen Mary"; he will gain less by this. It is good of course to a certain degree, but it is only "fair to middling" Tennysonian work. We find in it not a passage that stirs us, not one that charms. It puts the story of the Norman Conquest ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... led him into unpleasant rencontres with these military conservators of public order, and who mentions them so often that he may be termed their poet laureate,* thus admonishes his readers, warned ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Robert Southey, poet laureate, and conservative Churchman, wrote the life of Nelson, wrote it on stolen time—sandwiched in between essays and epics. And now behold it is the one effort of Robert Southey that perennially survives, and is religiously read—his one great claim to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... blaze of silk and jewels upon an enormous elephant with a painted trunk and trappings fringed in gold and silver. Trumpeters and the crimson flag of Chita went before him; Maun Rao and the other generals rode behind him; at his side sat his bard, his poet laureate, with glowing eyes, speaking constantly into his royal ear the glorious annals of his house. Colonel Starr and his little suite met this wonderful cavalcade a quarter of a mile from the city, and the Maharajah and ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... in all our mountaineering, and we allowed no surmountable difficulties to daunt us. What birds select such steep places for a habitat? Here lived in happy domesticity the lyrical green-tailed towhee, the bird of the liquid voice, the poet laureate of the steep, bushy mountain sides, just as the water-ousel is the poet of the cascades far down in the canyons and gulches; here also thrived the spurred towhees, one of which had tucked a nest beneath a bush cradling three speckled eggs. This was the ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... poetical work. It is a ballad that is important for two things; firstly, it is about a very English thing; secondly, the style of the writing is nothing short of delightful, a statement that is not true of all good poetry. It has been said that Chesterton might well be the Poet Laureate; at least, it is a matter for extreme joy that he is not, not because he is not worth that honour, but because anything that tended to reduce his poetical output would be a serious thing in these days when good poets are as scarce as really ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... boards guests of rank and fashion from beyond Temple Bar were often seen, the Guildhall and the halls of the great companies were enlivened by many sumptuous banquets. During these repasts, odes composed by the poet laureate of the corporation, in praise of the King, the Duke, and the Mayor, were sung to music. The drinking was deep and the shouting loud. An observant Tory, who had often shared in these revels, has remarked that the practice of huzzaing after ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the Iambic poet, gave himself wholly to write impure and lascivious things: so SKELTON (I know not for what great worthiness, surnamed the Poet Laureate) applied his wit to scurrilities and ridiculous matters; such [as] among the Greeks were called Pantomimi, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... writing his prize-poem about Petra, Lord John Manners (afterwards seventh Duke of Rutland), in his capacity as Poet Laureate of Young England, was writing chivalrous ditties about castles and banners, and merry peasants, and Holy Church. This kind of mediaeval romanticism, though glorified by Lord Beaconsfield in Coningsby, seemed purely laughable to ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... recalling the Poet Laureate's modernized Ulysses, the great wanderer, insatiate of new experiences, as we read the story of the octogenarian traveller and his ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... purchases newspapers (though it mostly consists of coloured evening editions arranged in a stiff skirt, like that of a saltatrice, round the waist of the wearer) has many mysterious points. The attire of a person prepared to criticise the Poet Laureate is something so awful and striking that I dare not even begin to describe it; the one fact which I am willing to reveal, and to state seriously and responsibly, is that it buttons ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... Tennyson broke silence no more; and Lytton subsequently made what was put forward as an amende honorable, in a speech at Hertford (October, 1862), when he said that "we must comfort ourselves with the thought so exquisitely expressed by our Poet Laureate," and so forth. The quarrel between Punch and Lytton faded, first into a truce, and then into friendship; and in 1851 we find several of the Staff playing "Not so Bad as we Seem"—written specially for them—at Devonshire House, before the Queen and the Prince Consort. It may not inappropriately ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... writing poetry and lived an uneventful life, surrounded by his family and friends, in the beautiful Lake District, in the North of England, which he describes in his poems. From 1843 till his death in 1850 he was Poet Laureate of England. ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... foot, numbers, strain, rhythm; accentuation &c (voice) 580; dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapest &c; hexameter, pentameter; Alexandrine; anacrusis^, antispast^, blank verse, ictus. elegiacs &c adj.; elegiac verse, elegaic meter, elegaic poetry. poet, poet laureate; laureate; bard, lyrist^, scald, skald^, troubadour, trouvere [Fr.]; minstrel; minnesinger, meistersinger [G.]; improvisatore^; versifier, sonneteer; rhymer, rhymist^, rhymester; ballad monger, runer^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... p. 20.).—Your correspondent S. H. will find "an account of the origin, office, emoluments, and privileges of poet laureate" in a recent work entitled The Lives of the Poets Laureate, with an Introductory Essay on the Title and Office, by W. S. Austin, Jun., and J. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... were somebody), if he were a poor writer by making him more conspicuous, and if he were a good one by setting him at war with the little fry of his own profession, for there are poets little enough to envy even a poet laureate. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... appointment always seemed to me, even before I knew that he had acted against Wilde, curiously characteristic of English life and of the casual, contemptuous way Englishmen of the governing class regard letters. In the same spirit Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister made a journalist Poet Laureate simply because he had puffed him for years in the columns of The Standard. Lord Salisbury probably neither knew nor cared that Alfred Austin had never written a line that could live. One thing Mr. Brookfield's witnesses established: every offence ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... book was written, Southey lived at Greta Hall, by Keswick, and had gathered a large library about him. He was Poet Laureate. He had a pension from the Civil List, worth less than 200 pounds a year, and he was living at peace upon a little income enlarged by his yearly earnings as a writer. In 1818 his whole private fortune was 400 pounds in consols. ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... undertaking; and, in consequence of that intelligence, he published, in 1747, The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, addressed to the right honourable Philip Dormer, earl of Chesterfield, one of his majesty's principal secretaries of state. Mr. Whitehead, afterwards poet laureate, undertook to convey the manuscript to his lordship: the consequence was an invitation from lord Chesterfield to the author. A stronger contrast of characters could not be brought together; the nobleman, celebrated for his wit, and all the graces of polite behaviour; the author, conscious of ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... made up in the forms of crosses, infants, etc., to which has been ascribed the origin of bakers presenting their customers with cakes, or, as they are sometimes called, "Yule dough." It is supposed that the New Year's ode composed by the Poet Laureate was originally regarded as a Yule song or Wassail song. For such verses Christmas carols were substituted, as being more appropriate for the season of the year, observed with joy in honour of Christ's ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... understanding bent upon his heart to make himself and others not in words or opinion but in life and action good and great." Ben Jonson was in turn a soldier, a poet, a bricklayer, an actor, and ultimately the first poet laureate. Lodge, after leaving Oxford, passed through the various professions of soldiering, medicine, playwriting, and fiction, and he wrote his novel Rosalind, on which Shakespeare based As You Like It while he was sailing on a piratical venture on the Spanish Main. This connection ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... the Quarto of 1691 the play is divided into acts, but not into scenes, though the first act is headed Actus Primus, Scaena Prima. The first systematic division into scenes was made by Nicholas Rowe, poet laureate to George I, in the edition which he issued in six octavo volumes in 1709. In this edition Rowe, an experienced playwright, marked the entrances and exits of the characters and introduced many stage directions and the list of dramatis personae which ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... pessimistic remark, made by a hopeful and cheerful man, lies in the fact that we place small premium in either honor or money on the business of teaching. As, in the olden times, barbers and scullions ranked with musicians, and the Master of the Hounds wore a bigger medal than the Poet Laureate, so do we pay our teachers the same as coachmen and coal-heavers, giving them a plentiful lack of everything ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... the Greater Ruritania by the cultivated classes who regarded Kipling, Treitschke, and Maurice Barres as one hundred percent Ruritanian. But the grandiose idea aroused no enthusiasm abroad. So holding this finest flower of the Ruritanian genius, as their poet laureate said, to their hearts, Ruritania's statesmen went forth to divide and conquer. They divided the claim into sectors. For each piece they invoked that stereotype which some one or more of their allies found it difficult to resist, because that ally had claims for which it ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... D'Este, newly arrived from Italy, and accompanied by the poet Tasso, wearing a "gabardine and a hood of satin." Catherine showed the Italian great favor, as was due a countryman, but there was another poet among them as well, Ronsard, the poet laureate of the time. The Duc de Guise had followed in the wake of Marguerite, unbeknown to Catherine, who frowned down any possibility of an alliance between the houses of Valois ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... hearing.' The writer must have been an ardent vivisector, for he concludes by a suggestion that 'all malefactors should be kept for experiments instead of being hanged.' In another number this periodical indulges in a criticism upon the new ode of the poet laureate (Colley Cibber), in the course of which the writer expresses an opinion that 'when a song is good sense, it must be made nonsense before it is made music; so when a song is nonsense, there is no other way but by singing it to make it seem tolerable sense'—a criticism which, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... and Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, were inclined to promote the modern Hellenism and to reward the poet who sang their own and their ancestors' praises and even accompanied some of them to the field in the character, as it were, of a poet laureate nominated beforehand to celebrate the great deeds which they were to perform. He has himself elegantly described the client-like qualities requisite for such a calling.(43) From the outset and by virtue of the whole tenor of his life a cosmopolite, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... 9, 1631. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. His poem in honor of the restoration of Charles II won him the position of Poet Laureate. His best-known works are the poetic "Translation of Virgil's Aeneid," "Alexander's Feast," "The Hind and the Panther," and the drama "The Indian Emperor." He died ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... on the second in 1483 her second son the little Duke of York was torn away from her to share the captivity and dark fate of his brother Edward V. in the Tower. Among other noted persons who sought shelter here were Owen Tudor (uncle of Henry VII.) and Skelton, the first Poet Laureate. The latter from his safe retreat in the sanctuary sent forth against Cardinal Wolsey invectives so bitter and so forcible that his death would have been certain had he ventured outside the Abbey precincts. ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... self-sacrificing thoughts are cosmetics that at last make the plainest face to be beautiful. In the calm of scholarship men have given up the thought that culture consists of an exquisite refinement in manners and dress, in language and equipage. The poet laureate makes Maud the type of polished perfection. She is "icily regular, splendidly null," for culture is more of the heart than of the mind. But as eloquence means that an orator has so mastered the laws of posture, and gesture and thought and speech that they are utterly forgotten, and have become second ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... with discerning readers that enthusiastic appreciation of which he is certain for all the future. The crowning mark of recognition came in 1843 when on the death of his friend Southey he was made Poet Laureate. The honor, however, had been so long delayed that it was largely barren. Ten years earlier his life had been darkened by the mental decay of his sister and the death of Coleridge; and other personal sorrows now came upon him. He died in 1850 ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... unwilling to be present, and therefore they who were not chosen could not afterwards express their displeasure. No grumbling was heard among the peers, and that which came from the peeresses floated down into the current of the great fight about the evening entertainment. The poet laureate was of course asked, and the second poet was as much a matter of course. Only two Academicians had in this year painted royalty, so that there was no ground for jealousy there. There were three, and only three, specially insolent and specially disagreeable independent ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... intumuit, &c., or as he said in the comedy, [5814]Duxi uxorem, quam ibi miseriam vidi, nati filii, alia cura. All gifts and invitations cease, no friend will esteem thee, and thou shalt be compelled to lament thy misery, and make thy moan with [5815]Bartholomeus Scheraeus, that famous poet laureate, and professor of Hebrew in Wittenberg: I had finished this work long since, but that inter alia dura et tristia quae misero mihi pene tergum fregerunt, (I use his own words) amongst many miseries which almost broke my back, [Greek: syzygia] ob Xantipismum, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... (died 828). But it is rather the Persian spirit which rules,—the spirit of the Shahnameh and Firdausi,—"charming elegance, servile court flattery, and graceful wit." In none are the characteristics so manifest as in Abu Nuwas (762-819), the Poet Laureate of Harun, the Imr-al-Kais of his time. His themes are wine and love. Everything else he casts to the wind; and like his modern counterpart, Heine, he drives the wit of his satire deep into the holiest feelings of his people. "I would ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... poet alluded to by Scott in the forty-first chapter of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, as "him of the laurel wreath," was Robert Southey, who was appointed poet laureate of England in 1813. The lines quoted are from Southey's poem of "Thalaba the Destroyer," eleventh ...
— Harper's Young People, September 21, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... precise, scientific. Men were to him no more than pawns, without individuality or personal value. But as cases it was different. The more broken a man was, the more precarious his grip on life, the greater his significance in the eyes of Doctor Bicknell. He would as readily forsake a poet laureate suffering from a common accident for a nameless, mangled vagrant who defied every law of life by refusing to die, as would a child forsake a Punch and ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... substantial man," or "tall and strong," or words to that effect. I replied that it was very evident from the general appearance of Shakespeare's bust that he was a very tall man, but that though the thunder of height had hit twice—the Poet Laureate being the second case—that I had been very slightly singed, tall as I was. Enfin, some days after, Tennyson in a letter invited me to call and see him should I ever be in the Isle of Wight; which took place by mere ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... perhaps hardly necessary to explain that in the words "successors of Tennyson" I make no reference to an actual or a prospective Poet Laureate. The position primarily held by Tennyson in his lifetime, and the only position in which posterity will regard him, is the position of the poet. That he was the laureate also is no doubt a matter of some biographical interest, but it is of little further significance. It will be doing no ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... and make a show of fight, but it is perfectly harmless and defenceless, and usually endeavours to escape as quickly as possible, and will bury itself in the long grass, the hedge bottom, or underground with marvellous rapidity. Like the late Poet Laureate, Lord Tennyson, the writer has more than once kept a tame snake of this species, and has even carried it about in his coat pocket, to the astonishment of urchins who have seen its head peeping out. In a state of nature they hybernate; but when kept in a room, a favourite resort in cold weather ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter |
