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The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.

Matthew Arnold

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Matthew Arnold
Age: 65 †
Born: 1822
Born: December 24
Died: 1888
Died: April 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
School Inspector
University Teacher
Writer
Laleham
Surrey
Soul
Composed
Pope
Wit
Genuine
Poetry
Difference
Briefly
Differences
Wits
School
Conceived

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Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
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What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.
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France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
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Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
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However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.
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Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
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I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.
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Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
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Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
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We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.
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Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
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The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
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And we forget because we must and not because we will.
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For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.
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Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
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For poetry the idea is everything the rest is a world of illusion.
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Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.
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