English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama Quotes

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Whatever else humanism is, it is emphatically not a movement towards freedom and expansion. It is the impulse of men who feel themselves simple, rustic, and immature, towards sophistication, urbanity, and ripeness. In a word, it is the most complete ...

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama

Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

Nearly all our older poetry was written and read by men to whom the distinction between poetry and rhetoric, in its modern form, would have been meaningless. The 'beauties' which they chiefly regarded in every composition were those which we either d...

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

The history of literature is very far from being one of simple progress.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive... An art, a whole civilization, may at any time slip through men's fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery. If we are alive when such a thing is happening we shall hardly notice ...

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

Some think it the historian's business to penetrate beyond this apparent confusion and heterogeneity, and to grasp in a single intuition the 'spirit' or 'meaning' of his period. With some hesitation, and with much respect for the great men who have t...

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

Attempts to connect men's circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama