“It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg…to remark on the utter lack of decorum of any kind in this dreadful little volume… ‘Howl’ is meant to be a noun, but I can’t help taking it as an imperative.”
John Hollander, Partisan Review
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged literary oddities, poetry, readings/research
“A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back again when it begins to rain.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities, poetry
“Chaucer, not withstanding [sic] the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible: he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity, which he does not deserve so well as Piers Plowman or Thomas Erceldoune.”
Lord Byron, The Works of Lord Byron 1835
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged literary oddities, poetry, readings/research
“We cannot name one considerable poem that is likely to remain upon the thresh-floor of fame…We fear we shall seem to our children to have been pigmies [sic], indeed, in intellect, since a man as Coleridge would appear great to us.”
London Weekly Review 1828
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“His versification is so destitute of sustained harmony, many of his thoughts are so strained, his sentiments so unamiable, his misanthropy so gloomy, his libertinism so shameless, his merriment such a grinning of a ghastly smile, that I have always believed his verses would soon rank with forgotten things.”
John Quincy Adams, Memoirs 1830
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged literary oddities, poetry, readings/research
“I look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more symptom of the general liver complaint…(Thoreau’s) shanty life was a mere impossibility so far as his own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. He squatted on another man’s land; he borrows his axe; his boards, his nails, his fish hooks, his plough, his hoe–all turn state’s evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry David Thoreau should exist at all.”
James Russell Lowell, 1865, from Literary Essays, 1890
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Mr. Auden himself has presented the curious case of a poet who writes an original poetic language in the most robust English tradition but how seems to have been arrested in the mentality of an adolescent schoolboy.”
Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light 1952
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”
Langston Hughes “A Dream Deferred” (1936)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Arnold is a dandy Isaiah, a poet without passion, whose verse, written in surplice, is for freshmen and for gentle maidens who will be wooed to the arms of these future rectors.”
George Meredith, Fortnightly Review, 1909
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, poetry
“A form of hysteria…One thing he has demonstrated, the impossibility of getting anywhere with the Whitmanian inspiration. No writer of comparable ability has struggled with it before and it seems highly unlikely that any writer of comparable genius will struggle with it again.”
Yvor Winters, Poetry
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
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