"Poetaster" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vicious doctrines of the French Revolution, and to hold up to ridicule and contempt the advocates of that event, and the sticklers for peace and parliamentary reform. The editor was William Gifford, the vigorous and unscrupulous critic and poetaster the writers, Mr. John Hookham Frere, Mr. Jenkinson (afterward Earl of Liverpool); Mr. George Ellis, Lord Clare, Lord Mornington (afterward Marquis Wellesley), Lord Morpeth (afterward Earl of Carlisle), Baron Macdonald, and others. These gentlemen ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... The poetaster and literary hack, Whetstone, who wrote a poetical memoir of George Gascoigne after his death, entitles it a remembrance of "the well employed life and godly end" of his hero. It is not necessary to dispute that Gascoigne's end was godly; but except for the fact that he was for some years ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... minion, could I " vie Angels " with India with a speaking eye Command bare heads, bow'd knees, strike justice dumb, As well as blind and lame, or give a tongue To stones by epitaphs, be call'd " great master " In the loose rhymes of every poetaster ? Could I be more than any man that lives, Great, fair, rich wise, all in superlatives; Yet I more freely would these gifts resign Than ever fortune would have made them mine. And hold one minute of this holy leisure Beyond the riches of this ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... Angels[1] with India; with a speaking eye Command bare heads, bow'd knees, strike Justice dumb As well as blind and lame, or give a tongue To stones by epitaphs; be call'd great master In the loose rhymes of every poetaster; Could I be more than any man that lives, Great, fair, rich, wise, all in superlatives: Yet I more freely would these gifts resign, Than ever fortune would have made them mine; And hold one minute of this holy leisure Beyond the riches of this ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... sister of Dr. Hammond, to whom one Dr. John Collop, a poetaster unknown in these days even by name, begins ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers. Indeed, this has been called by some the American Grape, and, though a native of America, its juices are used in some foreign countries to improve the color of the wine; so that the poetaster may be celebrating the virtues of the Poke without knowing it. Here are berries enough to paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal with, if you will. And what flutes its ensanguined stems would ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... the Battle of the Books:—"The difference was greatest among the horse" says he of the moderns, "where every private trooper pretended to the command, from Tasso and Milton to Dryden and Withers." And in Poetry, a Rhapsody, he advises the poetaster to— ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of "St. Elmo," or Gail Hamilton's criticism of "The Story of Avis," while Mrs. Rollins, in the Critic, often uses a scimitar instead of a quill, though a smile always tempers the severity. She thus beheads a poetaster who tells the public that his ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... think that they need end in failure except for one reason. The poet or poetaster cannot, now, except by flat lying and laborious forgery of old papers, produce any documentary evidence to prove the AUTHENTICITY of his attempt at imitation. Without documentary evidence of antiquity, no critic can approach the imitation ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... was cordially welcomed by Thackeray and the rest of the Staff, who loved to castigate the fopperies of the conceited poetaster, and Lytton, it is said, was not a little astonished at the virility of "school-miss Alfred." But Tennyson's anger soon cooled; perhaps his conscience smote him; for the very next week he toned down the savagery of his first verses in an ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... period, he presents through the medium of the parasite rhetorician Agamemnon. That happy phrase characterizing Horace's style, "curiosa felicitas," which has perhaps never been equalled in its brevity and appositeness, is coined by the incorrigible poetaster Eumolpus. It is he too who composes and recites the two rather brilliant epic poems incorporated into the Satirae, one of which is received with a shower of stones by the bystanders. The impassioned eulogy of the careers of Democritus, Chrysippus, Lysippus, and Myron, who had ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... to a poetaster's padding. He does not stop to consider whether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or, if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interference occurs again and again. And these disturbances and deviations, ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... incidental occupation only, not interfering with the hoe, the needle, the lapstone, or the ledger,—and, above all that there should be no hurry in printing what is written. Not the least use in all this. The poetaster who has tasted type is done for. He is like the man who has once been a candidate for the Presidency. He feeds on the madder of his delusion all his days, and his very bones grow red with the glow of his foolish fancy. One of these young brains is ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... time of Wieland's early enthusiasm, when he was probably contemplating, if not actually engaged upon a translation of Tristram Shandy. "Thy fate of yore" in the second line is evidently a poetaster's acceptation of an obvious rhyme and does not set Yorick's German experience appreciably into the past. The translator supplies frequent footnotes explaining the allusions to things specifically English. He makes occasional ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... these "statesmen," most clung, if not to self-interest, to personal crotchets. What is more darling to a man than the child of his intellect or fancy? How the poor poetaster hugs his tawdry verses as if they were the imperial ornaments of genius! Just in the same way does the politician love the policies himself hath devised, pressing them forward at all hazards, while he is blind to the utility of others. This is the basis of that aspect of selfishness which often ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... hardy climber who has set his heart," than with the jejune "As hardy climber." I do not know why you permit yourself this licence with grammar; you show, in so many pages, that you are superior to the paltry sense of rhythm which usually dictates it—as though some poetaster had been suffered to correct the poet's text. By the way, I confess to a heartfelt weakness for Auriculas.—Believe me the very grateful and characteristic pick-thank, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... out some poor scholar or exhausted poetaster, with a proviso that he never inflicts his own pieces on me," said Mr. Belamour, in a tone more as if he wished to console her than as it were a pleasing prospect. "Never fear, gentle monitress, I will not sink into the stagnation from which your voice awoke me. Neither Godfrey nor my nephew would ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... faulty and unpolished to offer the reader a shameful and obscene picture but also in general to depict whatever is cheap, ugly, and unwelcome. Hence those epigrams cannot be regarded as beautiful and polished whose subject is a toothless hag, a poetaster with a threadbare cloak, a rank old goat, a filthy nose, or a glutton vomiting on the table—all of which are a fertile ground of jokes for actors—since ugliness of that sort can never ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... 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^; poetaster; genus irritabile vatum [Lat.]. V. poetize, sing, versify, make verses, rhyme, scan. Adj. poetic, poetical; lyric, lyrical, tuneful, epic, dithyrambic &c n.; metrical; a catalectin^; elegiac, iambic, trochaic, anapestic^; amoebaeic, Melibean, skaldic^; Ionic, Sapphic, Alcaic^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Rome about 1645. I can give no other date during the whole four years. This, our only date, rests upon an assumption. In Marvell's earliest satirical poem he gives an account of a visit he paid in Rome to the unlucky poetaster Flecknoe, who was not in Rome until 1645. If, therefore, the poem records an actual visit, it follows that the author of the poem was in Rome at the same time. It is not very near, but it is as near as ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... Pilgrimage was the genuine composition of some poetaster who failed to get his poems published under his own name, or it may have been the deliberate forgery of John Agg, or Hewson Clarke, or C. F. Lawler, the pseudo Peter Pindar—"Druids" who were in Johnston's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... personally on the stage, and putting into his mouth a mixture of folly and knavery that was as foreign to Diderot as to any one else in the world. In 1782 the satirist again attacked his enemy, now grown old and weary. In Le Satyrique, Valere, a spiteful and hypocritical poetaster, is intended partially at least for Diderot. A colporteur, not ill-named as M. Pamphlet, comes to urge ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... 'We were so still!'—which is quite 'de trop.' You will see by the enclosed prefatory Notice what I have done in the matter, as little as I could in doing what was to be done. My own Copy is full of improvements. Yes, for any Poetaster may improve three-fourths of the careless old Fellow's Verse: but it would puzzle a Poet to improve the better part. I think that Crabbe differs from Pope in this thing for one: that he aims at ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... the persons described. He had the audacity to declare that the initials were selected at random. If so, a marvellous coincidence made nearly every pair of letters correspond to the name and surname of some contemporary poetaster. The classification was rather vague, but seems to have ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... of his fame could be found among men of much higher pretensions than this wretched poetaster. "The North American Review" had at that time been ponderously revolving through space for several years. It was then a periodical respectable, classical, and dull, all three in an eminent degree. Towards Cooper it struggled in a feeble way to be just, but for all that it was the ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... and of his insinuating eloquence; and he flattered himself that he possessed boundless influence over the King of Prussia. The truth was that he knew, as yet, only one corner of Frederic's character. He was well acquainted with all the petty vanities and affectations of the poetaster, but was not aware that these foibles were united with all the talents and vices which lead to success in active life, and that the unlucky versifier who pestered him with reams of middling Alexandrines was the most vigilant, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the critical spirit, but it loses heart when (to take a very definite instance) it has to ask what literary sincerity—what value for art and letters—lived in Swinburne, who hailed a certain old friend, in a dedication, as "poet and painter" when he was pleased with him, and declared him "poetaster and dauber" when something in that dead man's posthumous autobiography offended his own self-love; when, I say, criticism finds itself called upon, amid its admiration, to do such scavenger work, it loses ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... trust you can, When time is flying faster, That he hath served you better than Your humble poetaster. ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... reflecting on the posthumous glories of men of genius, to forget, is the reflection how extraordinarily scanty was the recognition which both Keats and Shelley met with in their lifetime. Keats was nothing more than an obscure poetaster; he had a few friends who believed in him, but which of them would have dared to predict the volume and magnitude of his subsequent fame? Shelley was in even worse case, for he was regarded by ordinary people as a monster of irreligion and immorality, the custody ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... raillery be without malice or heat. Dull poems to read let none privilege take. Let no poetaster command or intreat Another extempore ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley |
