I believe that the luxuriance of Shakespeare's dramatic instinct largely dominates that outburst of lyric melody which gives the Sonnets their life.
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"The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare's Art" (English Association Leaflet, 13, July 1909)Sir Sidney Lee
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Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets; Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing. I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare
Ultimately, Anthony Burgess's emphasis on the multiplicity of meanings latent in the text of Shakespeare's life foregrounds his own appropriation of Shakespeare … Clearly this is not an inconsistency on Burgess's part but a deliberate pointer at the inevitability of appropriating any given text, particularly that most irresistible one of Shakespeare's life.
William Shakespeare
I think I only needed something to hold on to. It has never been about depravity. It's always been about melody. But melody and I met in many depraved situations. Meeting melody is the victory of the empty spiralling nightmare.
Peter Doherty
I said I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Christopher's sentiment, that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation, and we find that most of the ancient legislators thought that they could not well reform the manners of any city without the help of a lyric, and sometimes of a dramatic poet.
Andrew Fletcher
First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world.
Aldous Huxley
Lee, Sir Sidney
Lee, Stan
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