Tag Archives: poetry

Paul Laurence Dunbar Knows…

Posted on February 6, 2018 | Leave a comment

“I know why the caged bird sings!”

“Sympathy” 1. 21 (1899)

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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Rotten Reviews: Howl

Posted on January 3, 2018 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Robert Frost on Our Financial Institutions

Posted on August 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.”

Robert Frost

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Rotten Reviews: Chaucer

Posted on July 8, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Rotten Reviews: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Posted on July 7, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Rotten Reviews: Lord Byron

Posted on July 5, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Rotten Reviews: James Russell Lowell Reviews Thoreau’s Walden

Posted on July 2, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Rotten Reviews: Edmund Wilson on W.H. Auden

Posted on July 1, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Langston Hughes on Deferring Dreams

Posted on June 23, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Rotten Reviews: Matthew Arnold

Posted on June 21, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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