Contemporary American Criticism

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James Cloyd Bowman
H. Holt, 1926 - 330 pages
 

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Page 124 - Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters. Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death— it is form, union, plan— it is eternal life— it is Happiness.
Page 35 - We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the litterateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, etc., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion.
Page 28 - I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
Page 61 - Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam, The Muse has broke the twilight gloom To cheer the shivering native's dull abode. And oft, beneath the odorous shade Of Chili's boundless forests laid, She deigns to hear the savage youth repeat, In loose numbers wildly sweet, Their feather-cinctured chiefs, and dusky loves.
Page 232 - Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities...
Page 26 - The United States are des*tined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time.
Page 49 - First, we must have made plain to ourselves what the poet's aim really and truly was, how the task he had to do stood before his own eye, and how far, with such means as it afforded him, he has fulfilled it.
Page 97 - Many a genius, probably, there has been, which could neither write, nor read.
Page 150 - O! ye unborn inhabitants of America ! should this page escape its destined conflagration at the year's end, and these alphabetical letters remain legible, — when your eyes behold the sun after he has rolled the seasons round for two or three centuries more, you will know that in Anno Domini 1758, we dreamed of your times.
Page 62 - Symons, there has been much talk of the "creative function" of Criticism. For each of these men the phrase held a different content; for Arnold it meant merely that Criticism creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age,— a social function of high importance, perhaps, yet wholly independent of aesthetic significance.

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