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For poetry the idea is everything the rest is a world of illusion.

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
Rest
Idea
Ideas
Everything
World
Illusion
Poetry

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I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
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Eutrapelia . A happy and gracious flexibility, Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners.
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Nature's great law, and the law of all men's minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.
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They... who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.
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To the Bible men will return and why? Because they cannot do without it.
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The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.
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Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!
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To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.
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Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye.
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Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes Ah, would that I did too!
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The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
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Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man taken by himself.
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A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.
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The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.
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Sanity -- that is the great virtue of the ancient literature the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
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Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with, To lead those false who trust it.
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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.
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Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
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Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
Matthew Arnold
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Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the sky, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?
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