#browning

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he'd replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he'd kept that job? ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#robert-browning #romantic-poetry #saul-bellow #time-magazine #whittaker-chambers

Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher? ↗

— Dorothy Fields

#browning #could #elizabeth #long #music

Love, hope, fear, faith - these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character ↗

— Robert Browning

#paracelsus #robert-browning #faith

To a Vase "How do I break thee? Let me count the ways. I break thee if thou art at any height My paw can reach, when, smarting from some slight, I sulk, or have one of my crazy days. I break thee with an accidental graze Or twitch of tail, if I should take a fright. I break thee out of pure and simple spite The way I broke the jar of mayonnaise. I break thee if a bug upon thee sits. I break thee if I'm in a playful mood, And then I wrestle with the shiny bits. I break thee if I do not like my food. And if someone they shards together fits, I'll break thee once again when thou art glued. ↗

— Henry N. Beard

#elizabeth-barrett-browning #humor #art

Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my Browning! ↗

— Hermann Goering

#culture #hear #i #reach #whenever

I entirely agree with you about the obscurity of Mrs Browning's line about the stars. It is far-fetched. She wanted to express something which she found beyond expression. ↗

— Marie Corelli

#agree #beyond #browning #entirely #express

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough. ↗

— Carl Sandburg

#enough #guidance #here #needed #poems

The Browning love story? It is an ideal, all too rare, and yet I hardly think it strange. It would have been far stranger had the fates allowed those two brilliant passionate souls to beat themselves out in silence. ↗

— Marie Corelli

#beat #been #brilliant #browning #far

Browning's tragedies are tragedies without villains. ↗

— Edward Dowden

#tragedies #villains #without

I watched a lot of silent directors who were absolutely great like John Ford and Fritz Lang, Tod Browning, and also some very modern directors like The Coen Brothers. The directors take the freedom within their own movies to be melodramatic or funny when they chose to be. They do whatever they want and they don't care about the genre. ↗

— Michel Hazanavicius

#absolutely #also #brothers #browning #care