A Quote by Don Marquis

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Don Marquis

Quote Topics

Poetry Blind Milton Poetry Is Saw

Quote Author

Don Marquis
American - Novelist
July 29, 1878 - December 29, 1937

The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. Although he was blind, Milton had one of the most unswerving gazes of all English poets.

Tony Harrison

The real reason Milton went blind was to avoid reading unsolicited manuscripts.

Rita Mae Brown

Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.

Alfred North Whitehead

No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.

Edwin Percy Whipple

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.

John Ruskin

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

H. L. Mencken

Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.

John Ruskin

Formerly Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton.

Charles Darwin

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

Damon Galgut

Money is color-blind, race-blind, sex-blind, degree-blind, and couldn't care less who brought you up or in what circumstances.

Felix Dennis

Milton took vaudeville, which, if you look up 'vaudeville' in the dictionary, right alongside of it, it says 'Milton Berle' - and he made it just a tremendous party.

Alan King

Right when I started in show... Milton Berle was my first idol. When I was a kid, I went to see Milton at Lowe's State, and I never laughed so much, and I said, 'That's who I want to be; that's what I want to be.'

Alan King

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

Terry Eagleton

Being blind is as simple as closing your eyes. The blind don't act any different than you or I. You never see a blind person going around saying, 'I'm blind.' So if you want to play blind just close your eyes and keep them closed and fare thee well.

Morgan Freeman

Milton, when he went blind, declared that he could now begin the real work of his life. Similarly, with the merciless passage of time reducing my phisical strengh, I find myself less able to explore the outer world, but better prepared to explore the inner.

Doug Scott

Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind ; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.

Lionel Trilling

A Quote by Don Marquis

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors