"Poetaster" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to be exalted in the pages of the Edinburgh, so famous for its incartades of old. As Dryden says, "He has done me all the honour that any man can receive from him, which is to be railed at by him." I am content to share the vituperation of this veteran—incapable in company with the poetaster George Gordon who suffered for "this Lord's station;" with that "burnish fly in the pride of May," Macaulay, and with the great trio, Darwin, Huxley and Hooker, who also have been the butts of his bitter and malignant abuse (April '63 and April '73). ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... have not the rare Lucasta, London, 1649; I'm a lean-pursed poetaster, Or the book had ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... an age of small oratory. Every man who could string a neat sentence together, scribbled or harangued. It was boorish and an unfashionable thing not to be an author, a poetaster, a little orator, a critic, a dabbler in the arts. At coffee-houses or clubs, wheresoever men foregathered, some fellow would mount a table and harangue his friends. The bloods caught the vogue, ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... agreed to correspond with the Courier and Enquirer, which, notwithstanding it was an almost pious newspaper, and edited by not less than two famous generals, and the grandson of a most worthy bishop, who was a poetaster, as well as a man of so much fashion that he had gained an enviable celerity for writing sonnets and eulogistic essays in admiration of fair but very faulty actresses; being the prospective correspondent of this ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... slipshod. No wonder that the dictator scorned his somewhat irresponsible co-worker. The precise nature of their quarrel, one of the most famous among authors, is not known; it culminated in 1601, when Jonson produced 'The Poetaster,' a play in which Dekker and Marston were mercilessly ridiculed. Dekker replied shortly in 'Satiromastix, or the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet,' a burlesque full of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and make a good name for yourself; and kill more 'French dragons,' and become a great commander. And our mother will talk of her son the Captain, the Colonel, the General, and have his picture painted with all his stars and epaulets, when poor I shall be but a dawdling poetaster, or, if we may hope for the best, a snug placeman, with a little box at Richmond or Kew, and a half-score of little picaninnies, that will come and bob curtseys at the garden-gate when their uncle the General rides up on his great charger, with his aide-de-camp's pockets filled ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... for answer I have waited, I thought an ace you'd ne'er have bated And art thou forced to yield, ill-fated poetaster? ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... 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 like a bunch of India crackers; once ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Queen entitle me the Fair, Fame speak me fortunes Minion, could I vie Angels with India, with a speaking eye Command bare heads, bow'd knees, strike Justice dumb As wel as blind and lame, or give a tongue To stones, by Epitaphs, be call'd great Master, In the loose Rhimes of every Poetaster Could I be more then any man that lives, Great, fair, rich, wise in all Superlatives; Yet I more freely would these gifts resign, Then ever fortune would have made them mine And hold one minute of this holy leasure, Beyond the riches of this ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... were conspiring with the actors of Shakespeare's company to attack him in a piece called 'Satiro-Mastix, or the Untrussing of the Humourous Poet.' He anticipated their design by producing, again with 'the Children of the Chapel,' his 'Poetaster,' which was throughout a venomous invective against his enemies—dramatists and actors alike. Shakespeare's company retorted by producing Dekker and Marston's 'Satiro-Mastix' at the Globe Theatre next year. But Jonson's action had given new life to ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... antitheses. Jonson was exceedingly combative and quarrelsome, and seems to have taken a chief part in all the bitter disputes of his time between actors and men of letters. He killed one actor in a duel and attacked Marston and Dekker in "The Poetaster"; they replied to him in the "Satiromastix." More than once he criticized Shakespeare's writings; more than once jibed at Shakespeare, unfairly trying to wound him; but Shakespeare would not retort. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... But let it be to another goose. The time will come, the fatal time, When he shall dare a swan to rhyme; The tow'ring swan comes sousing down, And breaks his pinions, cracks his crown. From that sad time, and sad disaster, He'll be a lame, crack'd poetaster. At length for stealing rhymes and triplets, He'll be content ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... to the authors whom I have pillaged in the following pages if I could recollect them all. The theft of the brigand-poetaster from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is deliberate; and the metamorphosis of Leporello into Enry Straker, motor engineer and New Man, is an intentional dramatic sketch for the contemporary embryo of Mr H. G. Wells's anticipation of the efficient engineering class which will, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... each head the initials of 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
... required: seeing that it pleased my indolence to be poetical where I was not sure of literal accuracy, and (I may add) it rejoiced me to induce a certain undermaster to suspect and sometimes to accuse this small poetaster of having "cribbed" his metrical version from some unknown collection of poems: however, he had always to be satisfied with my assurance as to authenticity, for he was sure to be baffled in ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... upon me, and which we are apt, in 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 ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 payment ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... 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 ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... 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, suspicious, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
