Poetry beats prose because it’s a) quicker to read and b) easier to remember. Here are a hundred authors (some non-fiction, some non-canon, stop sneering) who have read poetry and remembered it. Identify and quote the appropriate passages. Shakespeare & the Bible were covered last year (so #68 needs a non-obvious answer). One or two dramatic works referenced. Some poets (no works) appear more than once.

Hints on request.


The poets:

Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden

William Blake x 3, Rupert Brooke x 2, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning x 5, William Cullen Bryant, John William Burgon, Robert Burns, Lord Byron

Lewis Carroll x 2, Constantine Cavafy, Geoffrey Chaucer x 2, S. T. Coleridge x 2, Padraic Colum, William Congreve

Emily Dickinson x 2, Ernest Dowson, Edward Dyer

T. S. Eliot x 3

Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Frost x 2

John Gay, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Gray x 2

William Ernest Henley, G. M. Hopkins

Robinson Jeffers

John Keats x 8, Rudyard Kipling x 2

Charles Lamb, Philip Larkin, H. W. Longfellow x 3, Richard Lovelace

Christopher Marlowe, John Masefield, Andrew Marvell, John Milton x 2

Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope x 2, Ezra Pound

Christina Rossetti

Siegfried Sassoon, Walter Scott x 2, William Sharp, P. B. Shelley x 2, Philip Sidney, Stevie Smith, Edmund Spenser, Wallace Stevens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Algernon Charles Swinburne

Alfred Lord Tennyson x 5, Dylan Thomas x 2, Francis Thompson

François Villon

John Webster, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth x 4, Thomas Wyatt

W. B. Yeats x 3

1)
A dagger two hundred feet high hangs in the heavens.

A monstrous spider stalks through a valley during thunderstorms.

“A rose-red city, half as old as time,” rears out of the Arabian wastelands.

Deep in the earth beneath Maine are strange beings . . .

— Philip José Farmer, ‘Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life’


2)
“Young Mother.” — And so you think a baby is a thing of beauty and a joy forever? Well, the idea is pleasing, but not original; every cow thinks the same of its own calf. Perhaps the cow may not think it so elegantly, but still she thinks it nevertheless.

— Mark Twain, ‘Answers To Correspondents’


3)
At the age of three, disguised as a Dongalawi dervish, Harlan Ellison helped break the British Square at Omdurman (Omdurman? Schenectady? oh well), something he has regretted ever since. “Don’t know what came over me,” he has been heard to mutter. “Must have been the old jezail bullet I received in the fatal battle of Maiwand, which has been throbbing in my limb ever since; throb, throb, throb.” Since then he has broken the bank at Monte Carlo *one, thousand, times*; made mad passionate love to eleven weeping empresses as well as 987 women of other ranks; repeatedly swum the Hellespont (“Because it is there, that’s why!” he answers, crisply); published 885 books; and drunk enough milk to cover Australia six feet deep four times over. He is vast, he contains multitudes . . .

— Avram Davidson, ‘Magic For Sale’: ‘The Cheese Stands Alone’


4)
“This is not a happy moment in my life,” said Wilder.
“Nor mine,” I said.
“Unfortunately for all of us,” he said, “the moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.”
“You said a mouthful,” I said.

— Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Hocus Pocus’


5)
. . . even love itself, even the best kind of love (for he could honestly say that he hated the other kind — that dreadful brothel in Barcelona, for example, and here, at home, those huggings after the third or fourth cocktail, those gropings by the roadside in a parked car) — yes, even the best kind of love might be inadequate, might actually be worse than inadequate. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not something or other more.”

— Aldous Huxley, ‘After Many A Summer Dies The Swan’

6)
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

— Carson McCullers


7)
You will find these seven words — PROPOSITION, ATTRIBUTE, TERM, SUBJECT, PREDICATE, PARTICULAR, UNIVERSAL — charmingly useful, if any friend should happen to ask if you have ever studied Logic. Mind you bring all seven words into your answer, and you friend will go away deeply impressed — ‘a sadder and a wiser man’.

— Lewis Carroll, ‘The Game Of Logic’


8)
He crouched down, gathering up her items. Purse, sweater, underwear. ‘I’ll tell you the poem and then you’ll understand why I can’t go with you to places you and Denny went; I can’t replace him, like a new Denny. Next you’ll be giving me his wallet, which is probably ostrich hide, his watch, a Criterion, his agitite cuff links — ’ He broke off.

‘“I must be gone: there is a grave where daffodil and lily wave, and — ”’

He paused.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I’m listening.’

‘“And I would please the hapless faun, buried under the sleepy ground, with mirthful songs before the dawn.’”

‘What does “mirthful” mean?’ she asked.

He ignored her and spoke on. ‘“His shouting days with mirth were crowned; and still I dream he treads the lawn, walking ghostly in the dew.”’ Pierced, he thought, by my glad singing through. But he could not say it aloud; it affected him too much.

— Philip K. Dick, ‘Our Friends From Frolix 8’


9)
The Adagio of the ninth symphony remains purely human and personal and Beethoven was, at this time, reaching out after something that should transcend what is called the human. [...] He had, in the late pianoforte sonatas and in the Mass, given us glimpses of this new kind of awareness. He had probably said all that he could, at the moment, say. So he turned from his personal and solitary adventure as a forerunner of the human race to be a partaker in the joy and aspirations of his fellows. This is the last occasion on which Beethoven addresses his fellow-men as one of them. Henceforth he voyaged “in strange seas of thought, alone.”

— J. W. N. Sullivan, ‘Beethoven’


10)
A little before eleven o’clock their car drew up outside General Shrivenham’s house. The front door was opened and they entered a spacious lounge-hall whose walls and floors were covered with tiger-skins and other trophies of the chase. Even Georgia recoiled slightly from the ferocious, white-fanged jaws that grinned at them from all sides.

‘D’you think one of the servants has to clean their teeth every morning?’ she whispered to Nigel.

‘More than probable. Mine eyes dazzle: they died young.’

— Nicholas Blake, ‘The Beast Must Die’

11)
By 11 P.M., he had cleared Las Vegas and was pedaling east in the breakdown lane of I-15. No one saw him. No alarm was raised. His mind dropped into a soft neutral. He biked steadily along, conscious only that the light night breeze felt nice against his sweaty face. Every now and then he had to swerve around a sand dune that had crept out of the desert and had lain a white, skeletal arm across the road — look on my works, ye mighty, and despair, Glen Bateman might have said in his ironic way.

— Stephen King, ‘The Stand’


12)
It was past eleven, and my patient was slowly wearying himself into fitful intervals of quietude, when, in one of these pauses, a curious sound arrested my attention. Looking over my shoulder, I saw a one-legged phantom hopping nimbly down the room; and, going to meet it, recognized a certain Pennsylvania gentleman, whose wound-fever had taken a turn for the worse, and, depriving him of the few wits a drunken campaign had left him, set him literally tripping on the light, fantastic toe “toward home,” as he blandly informed me, touching the military cap which formed a striking contrast to the severe simplicity of the rest of his decidedly *undress* uniform.

— Louisa May Alcott, ‘Hospital Sketches’


13)
“Terry, you know I’d rather be with you than anyone else in the world. That’s the hell of it.”

“Well, if it’s hell — ”

“Do you love me at all, Terry? How do you love me?”

Let me count the ways, she thought. “I don't love you, but I like you. I felt tonight, a few minutes ago,” she said, hammering the words out however they sounded, because they were true, “that I felt closer to you than I ever have, in fact.”

— Patricia Highsmith, ‘The Price Of Salt’


14)
We have one self that is conditioned, all right. But there is another self that has never heard of an automobile or a telephone. This is the one that connects most readily with the flow of rivers and the light coming from the sun; it is in this second (or first) and infinitely older being that we can be transfigured by eyes and recreated by flesh. [...] As Camus says as he eats a peach (he *does* dare to eat a peach!):

My teeth close on the peach. I hear the great strokes of my blood rise into my ears. I look with all of my eyesight. On the sea is the enormous silence of noon . . .

— James Dickey, ‘Spinning The Crystal Ball’


15)
Shoz-Dijiji wheeled his pony and rode diagonally up the side of the hill toward a point where he might overlook the whole field and obtain a view of the ground behind those bushes. If danger lurked there he would know it before he came too close. Fools rush in, but not an Apache.

— Edgar Rice Burroughs, ‘The War Chief’

16)
“If anyone comes along,” said Miss Brodie, “in the course of the following lesson, remember that it is the hour for English grammar. Meantime I will tell you a little of my life when I was younger than I am now, though six years older than the man himself.”

She leaned against the elm. It was one of the last autumn days when the leaves were falling in little gusts. They fell on the children who were thankful for this excuse to wriggle and for the allowable movements in brushing the leaves from their hair and laps.

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. I was engaged to a young man at the beginning of the War but he fell on Flanders Field,” said Miss Brodie.

— Muriel Spark, ‘The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie’


17)
It must be noted that this film is not one of the director’s best. But as the saying goes, “Better to have watched a mediocre Sam Peckinpah movie about hired killers than never to have watched a Sam Peckinpah movie about hired killers at all.”

— David Everitt & Harold Schechter, ‘The Manly Movie Guide’


18)
There was rivalry between the two sisters of a never-quite-expressed kind . . . Married at eighteen, Sylvia would perhaps have liked at least a memory of lovers and the consciousness of something attempted, something done. Sheila, more open about her views, frankly said how nice it must be to have no worries, no fear of the future, reading in a leisurely way for an Open University degree, to be dependent on a loving husband . . .

— Ruth Rendell, ‘The Veiled One’


19)
For surely, at this time of day in the nineteenth century, there is nothing that an honest man should fear more timorously than getting and spending more than he deserves.

— Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Morality Of The Profession of Letters’


20)
My son,

Read this and destroy. Leave the other note lying about so it may satisfy the curiosity of those who have a watch on you.

I am anxious to meet you, for your own sake but also for the sake of both our planets and perhaps many more. It must be done secretly, or it is useless. I will only say now that you and your men are in danger of being made pawns.

If you possibly can, cancel any appointment you have, wear the enclosed outfit, and at 2000 hours — Earth-clock, not Hermetian — go to the parking roof. Take a taxi numbered 7383 and follow instructions. If you can’t tonight, make it the same time tomorrow.

“Long live freedom and damn the ideologies!”

Your father,
[seismographic scrawl]
N. van Rijn

— Poul Anderson, ‘Mirkheim’

21)
People are really far more naive and simple-hearted than we commonly suppose. It doesn’t take much to make them glow. I’m that way myself. Why withhold your kindliness from them when you see the glow appearing? To increase Renata’s happiness, I might have said, ‘Why of course, kid. You’d make a wonderful Mrs Citrine. And why not?’ What would that have cost me...? Nothing but my freedom. And I wasn’t, after all, doing much with this precious freedom. I was assuming that I had world enough and time to do something with it later. And which was more important, this pool of unused freedom or the happiness of lying beside Renata at night which made even unconsciousness special, like a delectable way to be stricken?

— Saul Bellow, ‘Humboldt’s Gift’


22)
April was spring, and in the spring Milo Minderbinder’s fancy had lightly turned to thoughts of tangerines.

— Joseph Heller, ‘Catch-22’


23)
What eyes. Grey like a night sky full of moonlight and pencilled all about with radiating strokes of blue-grey like the shading of petals. Darkening to the outer edges of the iris as if the colour had run there and set. A white as bright as a cloud; lashes, two pen strokes of new bronze, dark as sunrise before a single ray reaches the ground. And what a nose, what lips. Eve. Fearful symmetry.

A voice so sweet that I could not hear the words began to speak. Too full of woman. Too enchanting. I sat with my mouth open, grinning like Circe’s pig.

— Joyce Cary, ‘The Horse’s Mouth’


24)
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think.

— A. E. Housman, ‘A Shropshire Lad’


25)
It was past midnight. Whitehall was still brightly lit, still empty. The ministerial palaces on either side wore, for once, a stark blue-rinsed beauty, with fringes of snow on their cornices where they reached up almost out of sight.

“Sometimes this town remembers its past,” Agnes said, huddling in her sheepskin and breathing like a dragon. She began to quote:

“Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!”

“When I first joined the Army,” Maxim said, “most suicides happened in the lavatories. I suppose it was the only place the poor kids could get any real privacy.”

She stopped dead and stared at him. “Bloody flaming hell’s fire. Did you hear one word of what I said?”

— Gavin Lyall, ‘The Secret Servant’

26)
The hero of the year was Cole Porter, the jazz-composer. He had hired the Rezzonico Palace (what of soul was left, I wonder?), where he had given a Venetian festival, & having discovered from “the old books” (sic) that rope-dancing was part of these entertainments, had treated his guests to a rope-dance across the Rezzonico cortile. As the Princess San Faustino said to me with genuine emotion: “It was really magnificent. He revived all the ancient glories of Venice.”

— Edith Wharton, Letter (1926)


27)
CISSY CAFFREY: They’re going to fight. For me!

CUNTY KATE: The brave and the fair.

BIDDY THE CLAP: Methinks yon sable knight will joust it with the best.

CUNTY KATE: (Blushing deeply.) Nay, madam. The gules doublet and merry saint George for me!

STEPHEN:
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave Old Ireland’s windingsheet.

PRIVATE CARR: (Loosening his belt, shouts.) I’ll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king.

— James Joyce, ‘Ulysses’


28)
You might already be able to tell that I was born with a silver spoon up my ass. I offer no apologies. After three thousand years of dabbling with democracy, the remaining Old Earth families had come to the realization that the only way to avoid such riffraff was not to allow them to breed. Or, rather, to sponsor seedship fleets, spinship explorations, new farcaster migrations ... all of the panicked urgency of the Hegira ... as long as they bred out there and left Old Earth alone. The fact that the homeworld was a diseased old bitch, gone in the teeth, didn’t hurt the riffraff’s urge to pioneer. No fools they.

— Dan Simmons, ‘Hyperion’


29)
The raven had grown up in the forever-crumbling, ivy-clad Tower of Art, overlooking Unseen University in far Ankh-Morpork. Ravens are naturally intelligent birds, and magical leakage, which has a tendency to exaggerate things, had done the rest. It didn’t have a name. Animals don’t normally bother with them. The wizard who thought he owned him called him Quoth, but that was only because he didn’t have a sense of humour and, like most people without a sense of humour, prided himself on the sense of humour he hadn’t, in fact, got.

— Terry Pratchett, ‘Soul Music’


30)
Unlike Aurier, who avoided biographic detail in his article, Mirbeau was interested in Vincent as a personality. He wrote: ‘His was a restless, tormented mind full of inspired ideas, vague and ardent, drawn perpetually towards the summits where the mysteries of human life reveal themselves. It was difficult to say what drove him onwards — whether it was the evangelist or the artist. He did not know himself.’

The legend of van Gogh had started. ‘He became his admirers.’

— Ian Dunlop, ‘Van Gogh’

31)
“Here's to those bright eyes!” cried one, sluicing a steep wave of tea through the curved baleen of his moustache.

“Here's to her bewitching smile!” “To her orange ear!” “To her wee nose!” clamored others. “And here’s to the day she first came among us!” struck in a fifth.

“I remember it well,” said a converted editor of Schopenhauer. “I think it was I who saw her first. I thought, ‘Another woman!’ Yes, that's what I thought. When I came in and saw a parasol lying on the desk beside mine: ‘Another woman!’ I thought. I always think that. There are too many . . . ”

“Then I saw her before you did," burst in a biographer. I saw her at the doorway. She stood — *a sight to make an old man young*! Well, I don’t know, but the effect on a middle-aged one was startling . . . ”

— John Collier, ‘His monkey wife, or, Married to a chimp: A Novel’


32)
A Many-Splendoured Thing

— Han Suyin


33)
The soldier leaned back and laughed, smacking his leg: I watched the orifice glinting with stubs of ivory, shredded black gums, quivering, upraised tongue: “You kill me, kid. You’re a real storyteller!” “Yes,” I said, and I swallowed the rest of my martini whole and burning, “and now I must be off to meet Harry.” He was still laughing. “Harry! That kills me, baby. I’ll tell Tony Cecchino you’re two-timin’ him.” I opened my mouth: “You’d better not’ — but I didn’t say it, and I remembered I had forgotten Tony. Guilt is the thing with feathers, they came back with a secret rustle, preening their flightless wings and I didn’t want to think.

— William Styron, ‘Lie Down In Darkness’


34)
“Now don’t boast, Adolphe,” said Major Linklater. “You aren’t a Czecho-Slovakian. You wish to heaven you were.”
“I very nearly was,” Adolphe innocently retorted.
“Yes, we’ve heard that story about a million times,” said Major Linklater. “So spare us, my beamish boy.”
“I wish somebody would tell me the meaning of that word ‘beamish,’” Adolphe retorted. “It isn’t in the dictionary.”
“And it never will be,” said the Major.

— Arnold Bennett, ‘Imperial Palace’


35)
Gott! To dink, ten better Limey officers, at least, I shoot clean in the mittle of forehead at Spion Kopje, and you I miss! I neffer forgive myself!

Now, come, Cecil, Piet! We must forget the War. Boer and Briton, each fought fairly and played the game till the better man won and then we shook hands. We are all brothers within the Empire united beneath the flag on which the sun never sets . . . ‘Ship me somewhere east of Suez — ’

Be God, you’re there already, Jimmy. Worst is best here, and East is West, and tomorrow is yesterday. What more do you want?

— Eugene O’Neill, ‘The Ice-Man Cometh’

36)
No fat person ever uses the word ‘fat’ if there is any way of avoiding it. ‘Stout’ is the word they use — or, better still, ‘robust’. A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as ‘robust’. Flaxman, at his first meeting with Gordon, had been on the point of calling himself ‘robust’, but something in Gordon’s greenish eye had deterred him. He compromised on ‘stout’ instead.

‘I do admit, chappie,’ he said, ‘to being — well, just a wee bit on the stout side. Nothing unwholesome, you know.’ He patted the vague frontier between his belly and his chest. ‘Good firm flesh. I’m pretty nippy on my feet, as a matter of fact. But — well, I suppose you might call me stout.’

‘Like Cortez,’ Gordon suggested.

‘Cortez? Cortez? Was that the chappie who was always wandering about in the mountains in Mexico?’

‘That’s the fellow. He was stout, but he had eagle eyes.’

‘Ah? Now that’s funny. Because the wife said something rather like that to me once. “George,” she said, “you’ve got the most wonderful eyes in the world. You’ve got eyes just like an eagle,” she said . . . ’

— George Orwell, ‘Keep The Aspidistra Flying’


37)
And you say — so kind you are — ‘I love you. I love you.’ — and I believe — but who is she — who is ‘you’? Is she — fine fair hair and — whatever yearns so — I was once something else — something alone and better — I was sufficient unto my self — and now I range — busily seeking with continual change. I might be less discontented if my daily life were happy, but it is become a brittle tissue of silence and needle-sharp reproach punctuating.

— A. S. Byatt, ‘Possession’


38)
The Empress Of Ice-Cream

— Anthony Capella


39)
I told myself it was sheer silly conceit, that four or five of the cleverest people living, with all the might of the British Empire at their back, had the job in hand. Yet I couldn’t be convinced. It seemed as if a voice kept speaking in my ear, telling me to be up and doing, or I would never sleep again.

— John Buchan, ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’


40)
“Have ye never really seen anyone fish before?” Ian asked.
“No, never, it's all town where I live.”
“Well, I live in a town. But ye can get into the country, if ye take a bus.”
“With us,” she said bitterly, “you’d never get into real country no matter how far you took the bus.”
“Och, I wouldna’ like that.”
“Well, I don’t. I hate it. I wish I didn’t ever have to go back. If I had my way I’d never cross the border again.”
“But England’s your own country, after a’.” Disapproval hovered again.
“Yes, I know. Breathes there a man with soul so dead — but it was a Scotsman wrote that. It’s easy to love Scotland.”

— Elizabeth Coxhead, ‘The Figure In The Mist’

41)
The first time he saw her at the hospital she came shuffling up the hallway in the paper slippers they’d issued her and she smiled thinly and took his hand. When he came the next day he handed her a package but she wouldn’t take it.

Why? he said.

I know what’s in it.

What’s in it.

Slippers.

Okay.

I like these. I’m sorry, Bobby. You’re sweet to bring them. But I don’t want them. I won’t want to be different.

But you are different.

No. I’m not. In any case if I wanted to be who I am I wouldn’t be some person wearing special slippers.

Maybe we should talk about something else.

He lay back on the cot with his arms over his eyes. I shall not die for thee oh woman of body like a swan. I was nurtured by a cunning man. Oh thin palm, oh white bosom. I shall not die for thee.

— Cormac McCarthy, ‘The Passenger’


42)
Only Hoffman, with his Teutonic lack of humour, listened to the outrageous Mendoza with a straight face. In time, he and Mendoza became almost inseparable, though they made a strangely ill-assorted couple and together gave an impression of vaudeville rather than the laboratory for Mendoza sported flowing hair, abundant neckties, herbaceous shirts and suits of black velvet while his gleaming, impassioned gaze seemed to warn one to weave a circle round him thrice before approaching him.

— Angela Carter, ‘The Acrobats Of Desire’


43)
‘I feel better this morning,’ said Mr Woolton, ‘decidedly better. And winter is near its end. There is a faint doggy smell of the hounds of spring, very faint perhaps, but definitely there, a pre-vernal snuffle.’

— Anthony Burgess, ‘The Worm And The Ring’


44)
“A reminder to yourself?” I asked, recalling that I, too, made notes to myself.

Ned Emery smiled at me. “I’m supposed to pick up eggs and milk on the way home. I’ve forgotten the past two days.”

“I thought you might have been recalling a line of poetry.”

“As a matter of fact I was. I’ve eaten the plums you were probably saving for supper. Forgive me. They were delicious, so sweet and so cold.” Then he looked down in embarrassment, shuffling through his notes. “Or something like that.”

— John Riggs, ‘Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing’


45)
Withdrawing, she went up the stairs, and Joel, who listened to her footfalls overhead as she in her need of him searched the jungle of rooms, felt for himself ferocious contempt: what was his terror compared with Miss Wisteria’s? He owned a room, he had a bed, any minute now he would run from here, go to them. But for Miss Wisteria, weeping because little boys must grow tall, there would always be this journey through dying rooms until some lonely day she found her hidden one, the smiler with the knife.

— Truman Capote, ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms’

46)
“Gretta Palmer keeps using words like introvert and extrovert,” Ross complained one day. “I’m not interested in the housing problems of neurotics. Everybody’s neurotic. Life is hard, but I haven’t got time for people’s personal troubles. You've got to watch Woollcott and Long and Parker — they keep trying to get double meanings into their stuff to embarrass me. Question everything. We damn near printed a newsbreak about a girl falling off the roof. That’s feminine hygiene, somebody told me just in time. You probably never heard the expression in Ohio.”

“In Ohio,” I told him, “we say the mirror cracked from side to side.”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” he said.

— James Thurber, ‘The Years With Ross’


47)
Go see KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (Island Alive productions), an astonishing fantasy based on Manuel Puig’s extraordinary novel, starring William Hurt, Raul Julia and Sonia Braga. Very likely one of the most important films of the past decade. And see what the real talent has to offer these days. Do not go gentle into that good night of movie attendance believing that Explorers or The Goonies or Back to the Future proffer anything more meaningful than background to chew your Jujubes by.

— Harlan Ellison, ‘Harlan Ellison’s Watching’


48)
48. Kd3-e3
Hope springs eternal! There is a faint chance that Capablanca will play 48 ... Rfl-cl, to which White would reply 49 Re2-a2, followed by advancing his passed Pawn.

— Irving Chernev, ‘Capablanca's Best Endings’


49)
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the sky,
“How silently, and with how wan a face!”
Where art thou? Thou so often seen on high
Running among the clouds a Wood-nymph's race!

— William Wordsworth, Sonnet


50)
“There’s magic in the words ‘silk’ and ‘lace,’ isn’t there?” said Aunt Jamesina. “The very sound of them makes me feel like skipping off to a dance. And yellow silk. It makes one think of a dress of sunshine. I always wanted a yellow silk dress, but first my mother and then my husband wouldn’t hear of it. The very first thing I’m going to do when I get to heaven is to get a yellow silk dress.”

Amid Anne’s peal of laughter Phil came downstairs, trailing clouds of glory, and surveyed herself in the long oval mirror on the wall.

“A flattering looking glass is a promoter of amiability,” she said. “The one in my room does certainly make me green. Do I look pretty nice, Anne?”

— L. M. Montgomery, ‘Anne of the Island’

51)
Choral singing, much approved of by Fisher, was an important feature of Oundle musical life and I enjoyed it immensely. Every year we sang the Messiah or the Christmas Oratorio or Elijah and two years running everybody plucked up courage and we sang Bach’s B Minor Mass, an extraordinary undertaking which amazed the musical world and caused great critical excitement. The entire school took part. There was an orchestra of, roughly, fifty, strengthened here and there by professionals. The senior mathematics master played, brilliantly, the organ. The choir proper consisted of about 250 boys, and the 350 remaining formed the so-called non-choir. The latter learnt, at the daily practices after Prayers, the important themes of Bach or whichever composer it was, and then, at a given moment, joined their willing if untrained voices to the tenors or basses and just let fly. ‘Everyone suddenly burst out singing’ and the soloists, unprepared for this unbalancing vocal onslaught, nearly jumped out of their skins.

— Arthur Marshall, ‘Life’s Rich Pageant’


52)
“Now, here’s a short story called ‘Rosie’s Temptation,’ by Fosdyke Piggott. It’s rotten. What is a Piggott, anyway?”

“Mr. Piggott,” said the editor, “is a brother of the principal stockholder of the magazine.”

“All’s right with the world — Piggott passes,” said Thacker.

— O. Henry, ‘The Rose Of Dixie’


53)
And this meant that though Norman really wanted to know me, and though I really wanted to know him, I hung back, held fire, danced, and lied. I was not going to come crawling out of my ruined house, all bloody, no, baby, sing no sad songs for *me*.

— James Baldwin, ‘Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son’


54)
Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue,
Keep probability — some say — in view.

— Robert Graves, ‘The Devil's Advice To Story-Tellers’


55)
He had missed his train, and there were two hours to kill. The tide was out so he walked along the shore near Marazion, scared by his own indifference. The day was grey, the seabirds were very white against the slate sea. A couple of brave children were splashing in the surf. I am a thief of the spirit, he thought despondently. Faithless, I am pursuing another man’s convictions. I am trying to warm myself against other people’s fires. He watched the children, and recalled some scrap of poetry from the days when he read it:

To turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.

Yes, he thought glumly. That’s me.

— John Le Carré, ‘Smiley’s People’

56)
‘Stop!’ shouted Maxwell. ‘Blenkinsop’s divan, stop! Go down, rest upon the ground.’

The bed dropped down, clumped onto grass beneath.

It came to rest in a bit of green and pleasantness. A veritable Arcadian glade, all bulbous trees like giant broccoli, feathered ferns and drowsing dabbled blooms. Very nice.

Very very nice.

‘Let me out now,’ cried Rushmear.

— Robert Rankin, ‘The Garden of Unearthly Delights’


57)
The autumn and winter of 1957 had been the coldest I had ever known, and now the article under my hands was saying that the planetary winds had grown active again and the nation was in for extracold temperatures.

Zero-at-the-bone my constant internal reading, zero-at-the-bone the most accurate measure of my impenetrable mental state, I sleep-walked through the first three weeks of the new year . . .

— Michael Bishop, ‘One Winter In Eden: Cold War Orphans’


58)
Partridge knew a thousand things, that wet ropes hold greater weight, why a hard-boiled egg spun more readily than a raw. Eyes half closed, head tipped back in a light trance, he could recite baseball statistics as the ancients unreeled *The Iliad*. He reshaped banal prose, scraped the mould off Jimmy Breslin imitations. “Where are the reporters of yesteryear?” he muttered, “the nail-biting, acerbic, alcoholic nighthawk bastards who truly knew how to write?”

— Annie Proulx, ‘The Shipping News’


59)
In the hazel copse catkins were hanging pale gold, and in sunny places the wood-anemones were wide open, as if exclaiming with the joy of life, just as good as in past days, when people could exclaim along with them. They had a faint scent of apple-blossom. Connie gathered a few for Clifford.

He took them and looked at them curiously.

“Thou still unravished bride of quietness,” he quoted. “It seems to fit flowers so much better than Greek vases.”

— D. H. Lawrence, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’


60)
What was the one good thing about Winter? Well, he knew the answer to that; he’d read the book before. If Winter comes, Spring can’t be far behind. But oh yes, he thought; yes it can; far behind.

— John Crowley, ‘Little, Big’

61)
I ate my eggs and yarned with White. The drunken Scot kept interjecting, with unintelligible Scots rubbish. “Yerur — nae — narraer — getar — arrr — Glasgae arrhh — fuck.”

We get on to the beach and hire a boat. “Yem — nae ach — aye, Glasgae — abl — fuck.” I took the oars and we pulled gently from the shore. Out loud I quote, “All in the lazy golden afternoon — full leisurely we glide.”

“Yer nae sael ger — Glasgae — ah — fuck.”

A hundred yards offshore, I stack the oars and we just drifted — wonderful! peace! smoking, with our feet up. The sun is warm, the air balmy, the waters calm, the terrible Scot is sick — not in the sea, in the boat. We rowed back hurriedly, with him downwind. “Arragh — wae gal — ferrr — Glasgae ah fuck,” he said.

— Spike Milligan, ‘Mussolini: My Part In His Downfall’


62)
Tender Is The Night

— F. Scott Fitzgerald


63)
“ . . . In fact Lucy seldom stops talking. She’s more like a poster than a woman, a pretty but two-dimensioned lithograph. Advertising Jell-O.”
“But, he’s been faithful to her — in his ‘fashion.’”
“Yes, and isn’t that insane?”

— Taylor Caldwell, ‘Bright Flows The River’


64)
They drew near the house. The ladies were at the garden gate, waiting for their arrival and their breakfast. The spinster aunt appeared; she smiled, and beckoned them to walk quicker. ’Twas evident she knew not of the disaster. Poor thing! there are times when ignorance is bliss indeed.

— Charles Dickens, ‘The Pickwick Papers’


65)
“I suppose it’s academic, though,” he said. ‘Probably doesn’t matter. Either way, I don’t know if I *can* drink because I *don’t* drink. My reason’s fairly simple: the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Cedar Junction has a very limited wine list, no happy hours, and serves very little beer. So why resume a pleasant habit now that I’m going to have to give up soon for a very long time?

“Same thing with intercourse,” he said. “I’ve thought about one of those out-call services they advertise in the Phoenix. Go up to Boston, take a room in one of the less inquisitive hotels, have a whore sent over, on my Mastercard. But Taves’s office might get it into their heads to subpoena my records for some plausible reason or other, or just put a tail on me, and then when I took the stand and began telling how much I miss my wife, I might have some trouble explaining a paid encounter.

“So,” he said, “heterosexual entertainment being another item not included on the MCI program, I may as well get in training right now. Don’t drink, and: masturbate. Provide, provide. Prepare for what’s in store.”

“Cripes,” she said, “you are low. Are you sure you’re up to this?”

— George V. Higgins, ‘Imposters’

66)
The golden rule in any art is: once you have made your name, keep in there punching. For the public is not so much endlessly gullible as endlessly hopeful: after twenty years, after forty years even, it still half expects your next book or film or play to reproduce that first fine careless rapture, however clearly you have demonstrated that whatever talent you once possessed has long since degenerated into repetition, platitude or frivolity.

— Philip Larkin, ‘All What Jazz’


67)
She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said ‘Oh, woman in our hours of ease tum tumty tiddly something please, when something something something brow, a something something something thou.’

— P. G. Wodehouse, ‘Jeeves in the Offing’


68)
There were other choice phrases of abuse also, more in the nature of complete sentences, which Mr Shakespeare uttered when he had his breath back. Amongst these I noted:

‘You very superficial, ignorant, unweighing fellow!’
‘You wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy!’
‘You logger-headed and unpolish’d groom!’
‘Red-tailed bumble-bee!’
‘Foul indigested lump!’
‘You are the son and heir of a mongrel bitch!’
‘You dainty dominie! You stretch-mouthed rascal!’
‘You minimus, of hind’ring knotgrass made!’
‘Mad mustachio purple-hued maltworm!’
‘Thou little better thing than earth!’
‘Foolish compounded clay-man!’
‘A dog-fox not proved worth a blackberry!’
‘King-Urinal! Monsieur Mock-water!’
‘Thou finch egg!’
‘Thou idle immaterial skein of sleeve silk!’
‘Thou green sarsanet flap for a sore eye!’
‘Thou bright defiler of Hymen’s purest bed!’
‘You bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog!’
‘Thou disease of a friend!’
‘Thou thing of no bowels!’

And so on, and so forth. Mr Shakespeare was a master of this craft or sullen art. He could go on for minutes on end, insulting Mr Florio without ever repeating himself once.

— Robert Nye, ‘The Late Mr. Shakespeare’


69)
By hard experience, Forester was taught to know that obliging manners in our companions add something to the happiness of our lives. “My mind to me a kingdom is,” was once his common answer to all that his friend Henry could urge in favour of the pleasures of society; but he began now to suspect that, separated from social intercourse, his mind, however enlarged, would afford him but a dreary kingdom.

— Maria Edgeworth, ‘Forester’


70)
The mirror is the best breeder. On lucky nights it returned me my face as if it were bestowing a proud honour: this is the face that launched a thousand nights of love. This is the trap that lured the archangel into your bed: this is the precarious instrument that pulls polestars to you.

— Elizabeth Smart, ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept’

71)
“Snakes! my lord,” he exclaimed, when at last after careful search we demonstrated to him that the adder had died before it could come into action.

“I hate ’em, my lord, and they haunts” (he said ’aunts) “me. If ever I get out of this I’ll go and live in Ireland, my lord, where they say there ain’t none. But it isn’t likely that I shall,” he added mournfully, “for the omen is horrid.”

“On the contrary,” I answered, “it is splendid, for you have killed the snake and not the snake you. ‘The dog it was that died,’ Savage.”

After this the Kafirs gave Savage a second very long name which meant “He-who-sits-down-on-snakes-and-makes-them-flat.” Having remounted him on his horse, which was standing patiently a few yards away, at length we got off . . .

— H. Rider Haggard, ‘The Ivory Child’


72)
Meals on the farms, twice or thrice a day, were plentiful but monotonous. In the southern coast-strip and the Lange Kloof, a poor country, it was mutton boiled to rags or stewed in sheep-tail fat, and pumpkins, pumpkins all the way; but farther inland, in addition to these two staples, there would be soup, boiled corn and mealies, boer meal bread perhaps though not always, and milk rarely enough to be noted as a luxury by travellers.

— Eric Anderson Walker, ‘The Great Trek’


73)
Simon shepherded the artist out the front door of the house, and then came one of those vaguely foreseeable but unpredictable things which can give the agley treatment to the best-laid plans of mice. But not necessarily of men — or some men. The lights of a car appeared on the narrow road leading in towards the house.

“Run!” snapped the Saint, giving Adrian a shove.

— Leslie Charteris, ‘Catch The Saint’


74)
Unweaving The Rainbow

— Richard Dawkins


75)
One summer afternoon my wife and I went for a long walk in the woods. We were stopping at the beautiful Lake Mohonk Mountain House which is set in one of the finest natural parks in America, 7,500 acres of virgin mountainside in the middle of which is a lake lying like a gem in the forest. The word *mohonk* means “lake in the sky.” Aeons ago some giant upheaval of the earth cast up these sheer cliffs. You come out of the deep woods onto some noble promontory and rest your eyes on great valleys set among hills, rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun. These woods, mountains, and valleys constitute what ought to be a sure retreat from every confusion of this world.

— Norman Vincent Peale, ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’

76)
“Do you dream of women?”

“Sometimes.”

“Have you ever dreamt of me?”

“Once.”

“Was it pleasant?”

“Not all that much.”

“Oh my. What was it?”

“You couldn’t close your eyes. You just kept lookin’ and never blinked. It got scary.”

“I understand the dream perfectly. You know, a great poet once said that love enters through the eyes. One must be careful not to see too much. One must curb one’s appetites. The world is much too beautiful for most of us. It can destroy us with its beauty. Have you ever seen anyone faint?”

— William Kennedy, ‘Ironweed’


77)
He turned sharply up St. James’s Street, past the saddler’s with the jockey caps and jackets behind the glass, past the little bow-windowed snuff-and-tobacco shop, and so into King Street. From King Street he turned off into Duke Street, and then on into Great St. Ann's. After the bustle and traffic now behind him, the quiet sunshine and shadow of Little St. Ann’s beyond it was like port after stormy seas.

— Walter de la Mare, ‘The Magic Jacket’


78)
“Listen, Heckewelder, you must remember we had this to go through once before,” put in Zeisberger earnestly. “In ’78 Girty came down on us like a wolf on the fold. He had not so many Indians at his beck and call as now; but he harangued for days, trying to scare us and our handful of Christians. He set his drunken fiends to frighten us, and he failed. We stuck it out and won. He’s trying the same game. Let us stand against him, and hold our services as usual. We should trust in God!”

— Zane Grey, ‘The Spirit Of The Border’


79)
“Charles, old man!” said Lord Peter.
“M’m?”
“That’s important. You realize the bearing of that?”
“No.”
“Never mind. Drive on, Polly.”
“Aren’t I making your head ache?”
“Damnably; but I like it. Do go on. I’m not sprouting a lily with anguish moist and fever-dew, or anything like that. I’m getting really thrilled. What you’ve just said is more illuminating than anything I’ve struck for a week.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘Clouds of Witness’


80)
The shrill whine of the saw was getting louder. It reminded Bond of the sawdust-scented sounds of long ago summer evenings at home in England. Home? This was his home, this cocoon of danger he had chosen to live in. And here he would be buried ‘in some corner of a foreign blast furnace that is for ever two thousand degrees Centigrade’. God rest ye merry gentlemen of the Secret Service!

— Ian Fleming, ‘Goldfinger’

81)
A few hundred people from the city swooped in from the sky wires, but most of the actual demonstrators were robots rented for the occasion by people from all over the world. Fortunately, only five thousand virtual-reality rent-a-robots were available for remote control in the city. Some of the disappointed uttered harsh words about this blatant limitation of First Amendment rights.

Luckily, Captain Farrel knew how to keep his head when all about him were losing theirs — and blaming it on him.

“Hmmm. What to do? You robots are smart. R781, what can be done?”

— John McCarthy, ‘The Robot And The Baby’


82)
The Silver Deep opened her throttle and sped away. The Foxy Lady moved through the Cut and Monk felt the thump and surge of the open sea beneath his feet, and the sweet-smelling salted wind on his face.

Pushing on the power he turned the Foxy Lady away from the islands and out towards the lonely sea and the sky.

— Frederick Forsythe, ‘Icon’


83)
I drank my coffee and paced around and tried to absorb all the details, as people think writers do (except you, my darling, who never think about it at all) and suddenly I caught sight of myself in the glass in the Ladies and saw my extremely correct appearance and thought, I should not be here! I am out of place! Milling crowds, children crying, everyone intent on being somewhere else, and here was this mild-looking, slightly bony woman in a long cardigan, distant, inoffensive, quite nice eyes, rather large hands and feet, meek neck, not wanting to go anywhere, but having given my word that I would stay away for a month until everyone decides that I am myself again. For a moment I panicked, for I am myself now, and was then, although this fact was not recognized. Not drowning, but waving.

— Anita Brookner, ‘Hotel Du Lac’


84)
They had been talking about the aftermath of the Falklands campaign and the recent IRA bombings in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park when Tom, who had drunk more than his share of the wine said suddenly, “You heard any news of Aileen, Dave? Is she out of the swing of the sea yet?”

Dave frowned, puzzled by the last words.

Peggy said, “He’s being clever, Dave. It’s a poem about a nun taking the veil.”

— Vernon Scannell, ‘Ring Of Truth’


85)
Never leave me my sweet, and then bejeezus an angle shot toward the door of the General leaning against the lintel stroking his mustache. Crouching against the wall terrified yet shining-eyed as women are when men do gallant combat. Throw him your garter, Lady Aspinwall, throw your slipper, throw your lunch, but for Gawd's sake throw something! Parry! Thrust! Touche! Where are they all now, the old familiar faces? What a piece of business! Grabs a string of onions and swings himself up the balcony, fencing with the soldiers. Got you in the groin that time, General!

— S. J. Perelman, ‘Scenario’

86)
“Cad,” said Sir Grummore.

“Yah,” said King Pellinore.

They turned round and marched off to their corners, seething with indignation.

“Swindler,” shouted Sir Grummore.

“Beastly bully,” shouted King Pellinore.

With this they summoned all their energies together for one decisive encounter, leaned forward, lowered their heads like two billy-goats, and positively sprinted together for the final blow. Alas, their aim was poor. They missed each other by about five yards, passed at full steam doing at least eight knots, like ships that pass in the night but speak not to each other in passing, and hurtled onward to their doom.

— T. H. White, ‘The Once And Future King’


87)
I received your Act late last night, and though I have run through it but once, I am impatient not only to pardon you, but thank you. I can forgive you anything but idleness; and music, which your words always are, has charms to soothe even me.

— Horace Walpole, Letter (1778)


88)
She marched to the door and heaved it open. “On your way, dreamboat. Make with the feet.”
“I came here on business, Miss Weld.”
“Yes. I can imagine. Out. I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. And if I did, this wouldn’t be either the day or the hour.”
“Never the time and place and the loved one all together,” I said.
“What’s that?” She tried to throw me out with the point of her chin, but even she wasn’t that good.

— Raymond Chandler, ‘The Little Sister’


89)
What we are doing now of course is setting up the world for a proper swell slap-up explosion. The bang is better than the whimper.

— Samuel Beckett, ‘Dream Of Fair To Middling Women’


90)
Now she yawned and lit a cigarette; and sitting up in bed clasped her slim ankles with her hands; reciting slowly, wryly, those marvellous lines of the old Greek poet about a love-affair long since past — they are lost in English. And hearing her speak his lines, touching every syllable of the thoughtful ironic Greek with tenderness, I felt once more the strange equivocal power of the city — its flat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs — and knew her for a true child of Alexandria; which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint.

And with what feeling she reached the passage where the old man throws aside the ancient love-letter which had so moved him and exclaims: ‘I go sadly out on to the balcony; anything to change this train of thought, even if only to see some little movement in the city I love, in its streets and shops!’ Herself pushing open the shutters to stand on the dark balcony above a city of coloured lights: feeling the evening wind stir from the confines of Asia: her body for an instant forgotten.

— Lawrence Durrell, ‘Justine’

91)
‘He died in the passage?’ I asked.

‘He died on his travels,’ my aunt said in a tone of reproof. ‘As he would have wished.’

‘“Here he lies where he longed to be,”’ I quoted in order to please my aunt, though I couldn’t help remembering that Uncle Jo had not succeeded in reaching the lavatory door.

‘Home is the hunter, home from the sea,’ my aunt finished the quotation in her own fashion, ‘And the sailor home from the hill.’

— Graham Greene, ‘Travels With My Aunt’


92)
Slouching Towards Kalamazoo

— Peter De Vries


93)
Late this afternoon we return to the housetrailer. Floyd lends me a park ranger shirt which he says he doesn’t need anymore and which I am to wear in lieu of a uniform, so as to give me an official sort of aspect when meeting the tourists. Then there’s this silver badge I’m supposed to pin to the shirt. The badge gives me the authority to arrest malefactors and evildoers, Floyd explains. Or anyone at all, for that matter.

I place both Floyd and Merle under arrest at once, urging them to stay and have supper with me. I’ve got a big pot of pinto beans simmering on the stove. But they won’t stay, they have promises to keep and must leave, and soon they’re driving off in the water-truck over the rocky road to the highway and Moab.

— Edward Abbey, ‘Desert Solitaire’


94)
Rick studied the Roman officer. “Head bloody but unbowed,” he thought. A proud man holding his head up after defeat. But he knows he’s beaten, and maybe he’s sensible.

— Jerry Pournelle, ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’


95)
Omne ignotum pro magnifico!

If our climate were such that we could go about without any clothes on, we probably should; in which case, although we should still murder and lie and steal and bear false witness against our neighbor, and break the Sabbath day and take the Lord's name in vain, much deplorable wickedness of another kind would cease to exist for sheer lack of mystery; and Christianity would be relieved of its hardest task in this sinful world, and Venus Aphrodite (alias Aselgeia) would have to go a-begging along with the tailors and dress-makers and boot-makers, and perhaps our bodies and limbs would be as those of the Theseus and Venus of Milo; who was no Venus, except in good looks!

At all events, there would be no cunning, cruel deceptions, no artful taking in of artless inexperience, no unduly hurried waking-up from Love's young dream, no handing down to posterity of hidden uglinesses and weaknesses, and worse!

And also many a flower, now born to blush unseen, would be reclaimed from its desert, and suffered to hold its own, and flaunt away with the best in the inner garden of roses!

— George Du Maurier, ‘Trilby’

96)
Alonzo pushed the buzzer at the last heavy door.

‘Teach us to care and not to care, teach us to be still.’

‘Pardon me?’ Alonzo said, and Starling realized she had spoken aloud.

— Thomas Harris, ‘The Silence of the Lambs’


97)
To Sail Beyond The Sunset

— R. A. Heinlein


98)
She rose to her feet and, using the indentations made by the foliage of the model tree, climbed up into the hammock. He climbed up and lay down beside her. *And we are here as on a darkling plain*, she said, and he said, *You stole that from my mind*, and she answered, *Yes*, and the artificial leaves of which their couch was woven became real leaves, and they lay together side by side high in the branches of the tree, and he whispered into her ear, *Will it be all right?* and she answered, *Yes*, and the tree swayed gently beneath them and her flesh was cool and soft, there among the green leaves and the fragrant tree flowers, cool and soft and sweet and timeless, and he said, *Do you love me too?* and she answered, *Yes*, and the leaves rustled beneath them in the night and the stars looked down and the moons paused in their voyages across the sky as time ceased to be and reality folded in upon itself and that which could never be was.

— Robert F. Young, ‘The Last Yggdrasill’


99)
Sounded afar, farfaint, deep in his wooded heart, the lost and dying music of a horn. The memory of great doors, the sacrament of forgotten speechless words, the simple ritual of inevitable signs, the half-remembered passwords of eternity, winged their bright shadows through Eugene’s brain with their unspoken sentences of release and restoration.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn. Wear off my rust.

— Thomas Wolfe, ‘O Lost: A Story Of The Buried Life’


100)
“Sweet dreams, then.” I knew they would be. I took a quick shower, slipped into my jimjams, and cleaned my teeth. My bed was firm but comfy as beaches in Tahiti. The Hoggins Horrors were east of the Horn, I was scot-free, and Denny, dearest Denholme, was footing my bill. Brother in need, brother indeed. Sirens sang in my marshmallow pillows. In the morning life would begin afresh, afresh, afresh. This time round I would do everything right.

— David Mitchell, ‘Cloud Atlas’

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3) Whitman (Do I contradict myself? Very well, then [Song of Myself])
11) Percy Bysshe Shelley (Ozymandias)
13) Some Shakespeare sonnet?
14) T.S. Eliot (Prufrock)
29) Poe (The Raven)
33) Emily Dickinson (Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul)
36) Keats (Chapman's Homer)
44) William Carlos Williams
73) Robert Burns
89) T.S. Eliot (The Hollow Men)
93) Robert Frost (Whose woods these are I think I know)
94) I can't remember the poet's name, but it's titled Invictus.

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>>23352858
And we’re off. A fine start; 10½/12 I guess.


>3) Whitman (Do I contradict myself? Very well, then [Song of Myself])
Right. Davidson misquotes; dunno if it’s intentional. "I am large, I contain multitudes."

>11) Percy Bysshe Shelley (Ozymandias)
“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

>13) Some Shakespeare sonnet?
No Shakespeare in this quiz (he got his own last year). It is indeed a famous love sonnet.

>14) T.S. Eliot (Prufrock)
"Do I dare to eat a peach?"

>29) Poe (The Raven)
Of course. Quoth the Raven.

>33) Emily Dickinson (Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul)
Right.

>36) Keats (Chapman's Homer)
“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

>44) William Carlos Williams
Correct. The guy doesn’t get it quite right but it’s still pretty clear.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

>73) Robert Burns
“The best-laid plans o' mice and men
Gang aft Agley.”

>89) T.S. Eliot (The Hollow Men)
Of course. “This is the way the world ends . . . ”

>93) Robert Frost (Whose woods these are I think I know)
“But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”

>94) I can't remember the poet's name, but it's titled Invictus.
William Ernest Henley. “Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.” A “one-hit wonder”, but that’s more hits than most people manage.

>>23352505
>23)
>Fearful symmetry.
Blake The Tyger
>>23352527
>47)
>Do not go gentle into that good night
Oh Captain My Captain?
>>23352557
>80)
>God rest ye merry gentlemen
Is this the Christmas song about Good King Winslace?

>>23354009
>Winslace
Wenceslas

>>23354019
>>23354009
Oh wait. Those are 2 different Christmas carols.
I'm still thinking it is that one Christmas song line.

22 - shot in the dark but Chaucer? "When that Aprille with his shoures soote
33 - Dickinson, Hope is the thing with feathers
58 - Villon, "Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear?"
59 - Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
92 - Yeats, The Second Coming "Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
96 - Eliot, Ash Wednesday VI

im fucking stupid what am I meant to be doing

>>23354441
Guess the poem the exert is quoting or referencing.

>>23354507
Thank you

16. John McCrae (In Flanders Fields)
63. Ernest Dowson (Cynara, whence also ‘Gone with the Wind’)

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>>23354009
One right, one wrong, one half-and-half:

>23)
>Fearful symmetry.
>Blake The Tyger
Correct.“What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

>47)
>Do not go gentle into that good night
>Oh Captain My Captain?
You identified the line correctly, but it’s not from O Captain My Captain. It’s quite well-known because it’s also the title of the poem. Maybe another anon can help out?

>80)
>God rest ye merry gentlemen
Ah, this is perhaps slightly tricky (read: unfair). "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" is indeed the title of a Christmas hymn. But it’s "traditional" (i.e. no-one knows who wrote it). The poem I’m after is hiding elsewhere in the extract.

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>>23354381
All good except one:


>22 - shot in the dark but Chaucer? "When that Aprille with his shoures soote
Nope, same season but different poem. Heller is obviously playing games but even so it’s a much closer verbal echo.

>33 - Dickinson, Hope is the thing with feathers
Right, although someone else got it already.

>58 - Villon, "Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear?"
Correct. “Où sont les neiges d'antan?” One of the few foriegn-language lines that are sufficiently well-known in English.

>59 - Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Correct. “Thou still-unravished bride of quietness” being the first line.

>92 - Yeats, The Second Coming "Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
Right. One of the most quoted poems around. "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold", etc.

>96 - Eliot, Ash Wednesday VI
Correct. Starling slightly misquotes; Eliot wrote “Teach us to care and not to care, / Teach us to sit still.”

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>>23354980

>16. John McCrae (In Flanders Fields)
Ah, another one (like 80) with a red herring. I have to admit, “In Flanders Fields” is indeed a repeated phrase in a famous poem. But John McCrae isn’t in the author list. I had another, more explicit quotation in mind.


>63. Ernest Dowson (Cynara
Correct. “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”

>whence also ‘Gone with the Wind’)
Also correct. Poems are the best places to go to steal titles.

>>23352549
>70)
>this is the face that launched a thousand nights of love
Wouldn't this be Christopher Marlowe play Doctor Faustus when Faust sees Helen of Troy?

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>>23355119

>70)
>this is the face that launched a thousand nights of love
>Wouldn't this be Christopher Marlowe play Doctor Faustus when Faust sees Helen of Troy?
It would indeed. “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burned the topless towers of Ilium?” There's this and one other play IIRC.

>>23352564
>81)
I might be reaching with this one too since Alice in Wonderland only partly had poems but would keeping his head when others were losing there's refer to the Queen of Hearts?

>>23355132

>81)
>I might be reaching with this one too since Alice in Wonderland only partly had poems but would keeping his head when others were losing there's refer to the Queen of Hearts?
Right line, wrong book (although it's true the Q of H was strongly in favour of capital punishment). It’s the first line of a prolific author’s most well-known poem.

>>23355148
Damn. I doubted it but still thought I'd take the chance and play the odds with Lewis Carroll being somewhere twice.

Bump.

>>23355024
>Do not go gentle into that good night
By Dylan Thomas

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>>23357897
>Do not go gentle into that good night
>By Dylan Thomas
Right. The second DT entry is a bit trickier . . .

>>23352484
2 - Keats: "A thing of beauty [is] a joy forever" - Endymion
3 - Whitman: "I am vast, I contain multitudes" - Song of Myself
>>23352486
6 - Dickinson
>>23352491
11 - Shelley: "look on my works, ye mighty, and despair" - Ozymandias
13 - Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "Let me count the ways"
14 - T. S. Eliot: "Do I dare eat a peach?", Prufrock
15 - Pope: "Fools rush in [where angels fear to tread]" - Essay on Criticism (?)
>>23352502
16 - Keats: "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" - To Autumn
17 - Tennyson: "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all"
18 - George Herbert: "something attempted, something [understood]" - Prayer (???)
>>23352505
24 - Milton: "justify the ways of God to man" - Paradise Lost
>>23352514
33 - Dickinson: "[Grief] is the thing with feathers"
>>23352523
42 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "weave a circle round him thrice" - Kubla Khan
44 - William Carlos Williams: "Forgive me/ They were delicious/ So sweet/ And so cold" - This is just to say
>>23352527
47 - Dylan Thomas: "Do not go gentle into that good night"
48 - Pope: "Hope springs eternal [in the human breast] "
49 - Sidney: "With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the sky"
>>23352532
52 - Browning: "God's in his heaven,/ All's right with the world" - Pippa Passes
>>23352537
59 - Keats: "Thou still unravished bride of quietness" - Ode on a Grecian Urn
>>23352541
62 - Keats - Ode to a Nightingale
>>23352553
73 - Burns: "The best laid plans of mice [and men/ gang aft agley]"
>>23352564
81 - Kipling: "keep [your] head when all about [you are] losing theirs, and blaming it on [you]" >>23352571
89 - Eliot: "Not with a bang but with a whimper" - The Hollow Men
92 - Yeats: "slouching towards [Bethlehem]" - The Second Coming
>>23352581
98 - Arnold: "And we are here as on a darkling plain" - Dover Beach
99 - Chaucer: "This lyf so short, this craft so long to lerne" (not sure about spelling) - The Parliament of Fowles

Difficult quiz, felt like I mainly only got the obvious ones. Haven't checked the others so sorry if I'm posting repeats.

>>23358294
Pedantic self-correction on 24, I should've said "justify the ways of God to [men]" although that's a common mistake -- but Pope in Essay on Man iirc says "ways of God to man" as it's frequently quoted now. Also embarrassing that I misremembered "hope is the the thing with feathers" as "grief" because of the title of that recent novel, which I haven't read yet...

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>>23358294

A goodly haul here. Some have already been found:
>3 - Whitman
>11 - Shelley
>14 - T. S. Eliot
>33 - Dickinson
>44 - William Carlos Williams
>47 - Dylan Thomas
>59 - Keats
>73 - Burns
>89 - Eliot
>92 - Yeats


A couple aren’t right:

>6 - Dickinson
It’s a poem, but not Emily D.

>18 - George Herbert: "something attempted, something [understood]" - Prayer (???)
Right phrase, but no GH in the authors list. This is a word-for-word quotation.


But lots are right and you’re first:

>2 - Keats: "A thing of beauty [is] a joy forever" - Endymion
Right. Very famous opening line.

>13 - Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "Let me count the ways"
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways . . ” Mediocre sonnet, but a killer opening line.

>15 - Pope: "Fools rush in [where angels fear to tread]" - Essay on Criticism (?)
Correct. “Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead, / For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Everyone, quite correctly, forgets the context and the first line of the couplet and just remembers the good bit.

>16 - Keats: "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" - To Autumn
Right. Another first line.

>17 - Tennyson: "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all"
Right. Mangled but still unmistakeable.

>24 - Milton: "justify the ways of God to man" - Paradise Lost
Right.

>42 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "weave a circle round him thrice" - Kubla Khan
Right.

>48 - Pope: "Hope springs eternal [in the human breast] "
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast: / Man never *is*, but always *to be* blessed." Essay on Man.

>49 - Sidney: "With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the sky"
Right. 150 years later Larkin contributed another take.

>52 - Browning: "God's in his heaven,/ All's right with the world" - Pippa Passes
Of course. I’m going to go on posting this until people like it.

>62 - Keats - Ode to a Nightingale
Right.

>81 - Kipling: "keep [your] head when all about [you are] losing theirs, and blaming it on [you]"
Of course. ‘If.’ Another opening line. I thought this would be among the first to go.

>98 - Arnold: "And we are here as on a darkling plain" - Dover Beach
Right.

>99 - Chaucer: "This lyf so short, this craft so long to lerne" (not sure about spelling) - The Parliament of Fowles
Correct. The book is the original (enormous) version of ‘Look Homeward, Angel!’.

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>>23358294

>felt like I mainly only got the obvious ones.
One man's obvious is another man's obscure. You got quite a few I thought would be among the first to go.

There are two main ways these can be tricky:
— The poem is not well-known.
— The poem is well-known but the quotation is well-hidden (mangled, only subtly alluded to, etc).

And one rarer way:
— The quotation is well-known but people don’t know it's from a poem. (It sounds like a proverb or something.)

I think most people can spot the key phrases most of the time, even when they’re not signalled. There’s usually a shift of tone when authors start quoting.

Of the unanswered ones, I think these have a reasonably famous quotation presented reasonably plainly:

4, 7, 34, 46, 50, 64, 66, 78, 82

Bump. Have yet to play, and wanna try my luck this evening!

Bump for >>23359740

>>23360927
Thanks, anon. Working backwards, I went through the first (last) 25: will have to attempt the rest tomorrow as 'the rest' is what my body now requires--
99. Horace, Ars Poetica -- probably wrong because not exact
98. Arnold, DB
97. A guess: Tennyson, Ullyses?
96. Eliot, WL
95. Gray, Churchyard. I've actually read the Svengali (a Whistler characterization as well) novel. Very clear as to why it's no longer read....
93. Frost, Woods
92. Yeats, one of the Byzantium poems, or.. maybe Swinburne? Mind playing tricks!
89. Eliot again? Uh-oh
88. No idea. My favorite RC novel, however, and I've read the 7.
86. I'm sure that's Longfellow, but from where?
85. Thinking 'ubi sunt?' and Beowulf, no doubt wrong
79. Keats, sans merci
76. Yeats.. this means 92 is Swinburne, maybe?
----
Zonked, tbc!

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>>23361043
Good haul here. Just a couple of misses:

>85. Thinking 'ubi sunt?' and Beowulf, no doubt wrong
“Where are they all now, the old familiar faces?” is the reference but it’s not Beowulf.

>99. Horace, Ars Poetica -- probably wrong because not exact
This has already been ID’d. It’s Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls.


Correct although you’re not the first:

>89. Eliot again?
The Hollow Men
> Uh-oh
No poems appear more than once but several poets do. The author list says how often. “T. S. Eliot x 3”.

>92. Yeats, one of the Byzantium poems, or.. maybe Swinburne? Mind playing tricks!
The Second Coming

>93. Frost, Woods

>96. Eliot, WL
Ash Wednesday

>98. Arnold, DB


Correct and you’re the first:

>76. Yeats..
“Drinking Song”:
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

>this means 92 is Swinburne, maybe?
W. B. Yeats x 3.

>79. Keats, sans merci
La Belle Dame:
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

>86. I'm sure that's Longfellow, but from where?
Tales of a Wayside Inn:
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.

Longfellow used to be by far the most quoted USA poet. Nowadays people just think of Hiawatha. Lots of well-known stuff is his.

>95. Gray, Churchyard.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

>97. A guess: Tennyson, Ullyses?
. . . . Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.


--


>88. No idea.
I think most people can find the quotation ("Never the time and the place . . . "). Just a question of attribution.

>My favorite RC novel, however, and I've read the 7.
Dolores = best girl. Evil women are great. She's not even that evil really.

>really like Lewis Carroll
>can't spot which refers to him
>on there twice
Damn. And he didn't write that much either and is usually very distinct in verse rhythm and nonsense words. I feel dumb now

>>23361449
>Carroll

>nonsense words
Re-read carefully and this will definitely get you one of them.

The other is an explicit, well-signalled quotation but perhaps trickier because it's not a bit anyone remembers.

>>23352486
6 is Fiona McLeod (aka William sharp)
7 is Coleridge
8 is Yeats

Nice thread OP, these kinds of threads encourage me to read more...

>>23361463
Hmm
67
>tum tumty tiddly
Wouldn't be Tweedle Dee and Dum would it?

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>>23361502

>6 is Fiona McLeod (aka William sharp)
Right. Unusual for a man to write with a female pen-name. The poem is called The Lonely Hunter:

Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.


>7 is Coleridge
Of course. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.


>8 is Yeats
Correct. "Song of the Happy Shepherd".

>>23361561

>67
>tum tumty tiddly
>Wouldn't be Tweedle Dee and Dum would it?
No, that would just be Bertie Wooster unable to remember a poem.


The nonsense-word Carroll entry is his most famous one.

>>23361571
I went and reread the entirety of Jabberwocky to find it
>beamish
34) refers to the Jabberwocky poem

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>>23361580

>34) refers to the Jabberwocky poem
Correct. Alice Through The Looking-Glass.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

>>23361395
Thanks, for both the acknowledgement and the encouragement; love the quizzes, and the feel that more than a few /lit/ anons out there actually 'read around'!
I NEVER look at the poet/author reveal beforehand, nor at any of the other posts until after I'm done.
Will continue on sometime after work this evening. Really appreciative of both the work and good faith (it must require) to make these things. Thanks!

64 "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise". A quick google credits it to Thomas Gray "On a distant prospect on Eton College"
39) "Be up and doing" from a Psalm of Life by Longfellow
40) I presume it might have been Robert Burns, the only relevant Scottish poet, kek


Thanks as always for your quizzes anon, which reminds me. Do you have saved the answers to your previous ones? I was archive diving and found this one from the KJV quiz. Do you mind if I ask for the answer to it? I genuinely can't think of a Bible verse that's hidden in here

>51)
My first job was to keep going for the next three weeks. It was now the 24th day of May, and that meant twenty days of hiding before I could venture to approach the powers that be. I reckoned that two sets of people would be looking for me — Scudder’s enemies to put me out of existence, and the police, who would want me for Scudder’s murder. It was going to be a giddy hunt, and it was queer how the prospect comforted me. I had been slack so long that almost any chance of activity was welcome.

>John Buchan, ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’

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>>23362496
Two right, one wrong here.

>64 "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise". A quick google credits it to Thomas Gray "On a distant prospect on Eton College"
Right. The last line.

>39) "Be up and doing" from a Psalm of Life by Longfellow
Right. The last stanza:

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

>40) I presume it might have been Robert Burns, the only relevant Scottish poet, kek
Nope, Burns only appears once, and he’s already been found (#73).


>KJV quiz
>Thirty-Nine Steps

The phrase “the powers that be” was coined in Tyndale’s bible, and the KJV took it unchanged, which counts according to the rules of the quiz:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.

— Romans 13:1

How many are left?

>>23362605
Huh, I didn't know "the powers that be" is a Bible quote. I've seen it used so many times I thought it merely was a catchphrase

>>23363392

Current progress is 44/100, if I count correctly.

The most-cited poets:

W. B. Yeats 3/3
T. S. Eliot 3/3

John Keats 6/8

H. W. Longfellow 2/3

Alfred Lord Tennyson 2/5
Robert Browning 1/5
Wordsworth 0/4
William Blake 1/3

>>23364724
People must really like Keats

I just got ahold of the complete collection of Lewis Carroll poems.
I will find that other reference to him if I have to read every single poem he ever wrote god dam it.

>>23364965
It's not an obscure work.

Bump.

>>23352477
Ok, started at 50 to move back to 25
49. Sidney, --A&S cycle?
48. Pope, Es.Man, and 'wit' is nature to advantage dressed what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed..
47. Dylan Thomas, quote the title as well
46. damn
45. I know this is Chaucer because I remember the image but all the tales have merged (except the WoB's) atp; (I was reading In Cold Blood when my dad carted me off to college; St. Exupery's Night Flight when sitting on the Lawn, in cap and bells, waiting to graduate)
42. Coleridge, KK conclusion
41. Guess: Burns
38. Stevens, alludes to a title
35. Guess: Lear? Not Carroll
33. Em. D. Hope is..
32. Rats. I've looked this up before and all I remember thinking was Never heard of him
31. All I can think of is the Ashbery poem He (from Some Trees) where if you ever visit his island he'll grow you back to your youth..
30. A on Y
29. My dad actually rescued a broken-winged raven when we were in Alaska way back when etc, so I'm guessing on a single word: Poe. Feel I'm missing something here, however
27. S alludes to Blake-- MT?
26.of Veneece, and the grandeur that was Poe again? All I got
25. That's Wordsworth's London

>>23352581
>Brother in need, brother indeed.
A friend in need is a friend indeed! By Euripides!

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>>23366771
Another good haul. You seem to have skipped 51-75 but perhaps it’s all part of a cunning plan.


>32. Rats. I've looked this up before and all I remember thinking was Never heard of him
Yeah, it’s a ‘one-hit wonder’ thing. Famous phrase, but no-one knows anything else the guy wrote.

>46. damn
Everyone in England used to know this up until about 1960 when people who shall not be named destroyed our education system. Ah well.


Incorrect:

>26.of Veneece, and the grandeur that was Poe again? All I got
Not Poe (‘The glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome’). It’s a poem about Venice (or Venetians).

>31. All I can think of is the Ashbery poem He (from Some Trees) where if you ever visit his island he'll grow you back to your youth..
There's a name I've not heard in a long time. I quoted “He” in a quiz last year:
https://archived.moe/lit/thread/22549307/#22549381
Incorrect here, though (no Ashbery in the authors list). It’s a direct quotation.

>35. Guess: Lear? Not Carroll
Not Carroll, but not Lear either.

>41. Guess: Burns
Burns only appears once and he's been found (#73).


Correct but you’re not the first:

>29.
>raven
>Poe.
> Feel I'm missing something here, however
You might be missing the joke, such as it is. The bird is named Quoth, so it’s ‘Quoth the Raven’, which is a direct quotation.

>33. Em. D. Hope is..
Emily D. is the official /lit/ poetess and I’m OK with that.

>42. Coleridge, KK conclusion

>47. Dylan Thomas, quote the title as well

>48. Pope, Es.Man

>49. Sidney, --A&S cycle?
#31 as it happens.


Correct and no-one else got them:

>25. That's Wordsworth's London
‘Lines written on Westminster Bridge’. “Earth hath not anything to show more fair” etc. Finally someone spots a live Wordsworth in the wild.

>27. S alludes to Blake-- MT?
‘Auguries of Innocence’:

The whore and gambler, by the state
Licensed, build that nation’s fate.
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old England’s winding-sheet.

>30. A on Y
W. H. Auden, ‘Lines on the Death of W. B. Yeats’:

The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

I'm not a huge fan of the first part (Auden loves cities a lot more than I do) but the last phrase is absolutely brilliant.

38. Stevens, alludes to a title
Wallace Stevens, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’. The last line has a title drop too: ‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.’

>45. I know this is Chaucer
‘The smiler with the knife under the cloak’. Knight’s Tale.

>>23367257

>Brother in need, brother indeed.
>A friend in need is a friend indeed! By Euripides!
Mitchell *might* know he's alluding to Euripides, but it's a bit tenuous. There's another quotation in there; a more recent poem and much more clearcut.

>>23352557
>77)
I haven't read it but is he recreating the walk from Joyce's Ulysses?

>>23367781

>77)
>I haven't read it but is he recreating the walk from Joyce's Ulysses?
No, it's London (he starts in Pall Mall). The quotation to look for isn't going to be Ulysses anyway because that's prose (and no JJ in the author list).

Bump

>>23352477
24 to Home ('Clockwork Orange,' ..as I am only now easing out of this mental gear..)
24. I like this one. Milton, but honorable mention to /lit/gal Em. D's 'I taste a liquor never brewed'
23. Blake, Tyger
22. TSE, alludes to WL
21. TSE again
18. Lol, Longfellow's a x 2?
17. Tennyson, In Memoriam
16. I like Spark. Image that comes to mind is the opening scene of Memento Mori when some of the denizens of an old folks' home are huddled around a table listening to their horoscopes. Painfully funny. Keats/Autumn
15. Pope. The other half of the line's an E. M. Forster novella
14. TSE
13. EBB --I realized I loved her after reading Aurora Leigh; I read it when on a quest to read books that Em D. loved. Have you read Ik Marvel's Reveries of a Bachelor, anon?
11. Shelley, Oz
9. Rats-- gonna guess Coleridge. Already regret not keeping my mouth shut.
8. Geez. Alot recited but I'm blank.
7. Coleridge. Not a good sign for #9
6. Uhhhh, I have no idea
5. Lovelace, Lucasta
2. Keats, Urn
**
Withholding a certain quarter not part of a cunning plan. What was it the preacher saith? I was only sure of maybe 4 in that grouping; I'll look over the author list later then try that section again. To this point vaingloriously author-list-free!

Oh damn. This quiz might actually reach 100% answered.

4 is Omar Khayyam

>>23369860
translated by Edward Fitzgerald

78 is Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib

>>23352477
risotto adagio concerto bravo punctilious!

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>>23369563
Another batch to keep the momentum up.


>8. Geez. Alot recited but I'm blank.
This has already been found. It’s W. B. Yeats, ‘Song of the Happy Shepherd’.

>6. Uhhhh, I have no idea
Already found. It’s a poem called ‘The Lonely Hunter’ by a guy called William Sharp. No-one knows anything he wrote except this line.


CORRECT BUT ALREADY FOUND:

>2. Keats, Urn
Endymion actually, but yes it’s JK.

>7. Coleridge. Not a good sign for #9
Yeah, Coleridge appears twice and they’re both found.

>11. Shelley, Oz

>13. EBB --I realized I loved her after reading Aurora Leigh; I read it when on a quest to read books that Em D. loved.
I can’t say A.L. blew my socks off, but who am I to argue with Emily?

>Have you read Ik Marvel's Reveries of a Bachelor, anon?
There are books I haven’t read, but RoaB is not among them.

>14. TSE

>15. Pope.
Essay on Criticism
>The other half of the line’s an E. M. Forster novella
Not to mention a film starring Marla Singer and Bill the Butcher

>16. Keats/Autumn
>17. Tennyson, In Memoriam
>23. Blake, Tyger
>24. Milton


INCORRECT:

>9. Rats-- gonna guess Coleridge. Already regret not keeping my mouth shut.
This is one of those big names that people don’t seem to know nowadays.

>21. TSE again
There might be more than one (faint) allusion here but the one I have in mind is quite clearcut, and it‘s not Eliot (his three appearances have all been found).

>22. TSE, alludes to WL
Not Eliot (see above). Obviously a (humorous) misquotation, but still unmistakable once you see the original.


CORRECT AND FIRST:

>5. Lovelace, Lucasta
‘To Lucasta, Going to the War’. “I could not love thee, dear, so much / Loved I not honour more.”

>18. Lol, Longfellow's a x 2?
A x 3 actually. This is ‘The Village Blacksmith’. “Something attempted, something done / Has earned a night’s repose.”


Just two to add to the total, but this (if I count correctly) takes us triumphantly across the equator. Current progress now 51/100.

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>>23369860
>4 is Omar Khayyam
>>23369872
>translated by Edward Fitzgerald
It sure is.

The moving finger writes, and having writ
Moves on; nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line;
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

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>>23369894
>78 is Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib
Correct. Another big opening line:

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Can you post the ones still unanswered saving time jumping across a bunch of different posts?

>>23371072

Current progress: 53/100

Unanswered:
1,
9, 10
12
19, 20
21, 22
26, 28
31, 32, 35
37, 40
41, 43
46, 50
51, 53, 54, 55
56, 57, 60
61, 65
66, 67, 68, 69
71, 72, 74, 75
77, 80
82, 83, 84, 85
87, 88, 90
91
100


Poets available:

William Blake, Rupert Brooke x 2, Robert Browning x 4, William Cullen Bryant, John William Burgon
Lewis Carroll, Constantine Cavafy, Padraic Colum, William Congreve
Emily Dickinson, Edward Dyer
Robert Frost
John Gay, Oliver Goldsmith
G. M. Hopkins
Robinson Jeffers
John Keats, Rudyard Kipling
Charles Lamb, Philip Larkin
John Masefield, Andrew Marvell, John Milton
Ezra Pound
Christina Rossetti
Siegfried Sassoon, Walter Scott x 2, P. B. Shelley, Stevie Smith, Edmund Spenser, Robert Louis Stevenson, Algernon Charles Swinburne
Alfred Lord Tennyson x 3, Dylan Thomas, Francis Thompson
John Webster, William Wordsworth x 3, Thomas Wyatt

21 is "To His Coy Mistress" by Marvell
60 is "Ode to the West Wind" by P. B. Shelley
75 is "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant
90 is Cavafy, idk which poem but Durrell was obsessed with that guy

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>>23372409

All good:


>21 is "To His Coy Mistress" by Marvell

Had we but world enough and time
This coyness, lady, were no crime . . .


>60 is "Ode to the West Wind" by P. B. Shelley

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?


>75 is "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant

. . . . The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun, — the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods — rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste, —
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.


>90 is Cavafy, idk which poem but Durrell was obsessed with that guy

It’s ‘In The Evening’:

An echo of the days of pleasure,
an echo of the days drew near me,
a little of the fire of the youth of both of us;
again I took in my hands a letter,
and I read and reread until the light was gone.

And melancholy, I came out on the balcony —
came out to change my thoughts at least by looking at
a little of the city that I loved,
a little movement on the streets, and in the shops.

>>23352541
61)
>All in the lazy golden afternoon — full leisurely we glide.
The opening line to the opening poem prologue to Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
Damn this took too long to find. I kept thinking this one was about deciding the drunk talk and missed the obvious

>>23372777
>deciding
*deciphering

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>>23372777

>61)
>All in the lazy golden afternoon — full leisurely we glide.
>The opening line to the opening poem prologue to Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
Correct. Strangely it's missing in the Gutenberg AIW.

>deciding the drunk talk
Well maybe the Scottish fellow is quoting something but we'll never know.

9. Wordsworth. Description of Newton. Prelude.
12. "Light fantastic" is Milton. From Comus.
25. Wordsworth's sonnet on London.
28. Pound. Forgot the poem. Something about "botched civilization."
30. Auden. In Memory of W.B. Yeats.
34. Carrol. That Jabberwocky poem.
35. I'm guessing Kipling but not sure.
36. Keat's sonata on Chapman's translation of Homer.
42. Coleridge, Kubla Khan.
44. That e.e cummings poem.
74. Keats's description of Newton. I don't remember the poem.
77. Spenser, Faerie Queene. I think it's in Guyon's story.
86. Is this Larkin? I'm just guessing here.
95. Gray. Elegy in a Country Churchyard.
100. This one I'm pretty sure is Larkin, the one about the trees growing leaves in spring.

>>23373285
Just realized for 36 I wrote sonata instead of sonnet. What the fuck.

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>>23373285
Another fine haul; takes us to 65/100 I think.


>44. That e.e cummings poem.
Already found. William Carlos Williams, not eec.

>86. Is this Larkin? I'm just guessing here.
Already found. Longfellow.


Correct, but already answered:

>25. Wordsworth's sonnet on London.
>30. Auden. In Memory of W.B. Yeats.
>34. Carrol. That Jabberwocky poem.
>36. Keat's sonata make that sonnet on Chapman's translation of Homer.
>42. Coleridge, Kubla Khan.
>95. Gray. Elegy in a Country Churchyard.


Correct and not answered before:

>9. Wordsworth. Description of Newton. Prelude.

And from my bedroom, I in moonlight nights
Could see, right opposite, a few yards off,
The antechapel, where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

(The last two lines weren't in the 1805 edition.)


>12. "Light fantastic" is Milton. From Comus.
Milton yes, but L’Allegro.

Come and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic toe.

(There are some similar bits in Comus but there the tone is more disapproving.)


>28. Pound. Forgot the poem. Something about "botched civilization."
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.


>35. I'm guessing Kipling but not sure.
Echoes of "East is east and west is west", but it's not that one. It's called ‘Mandalay’:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;


>74. Keats's description of Newton. I don't remember the poem.
It’s from ’Lamia’:

Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine —
Unweave a rainbow . . .

This is the last Keats. I made a mistake in the authors list. He appears only seven times, not eight.


>77. Spenser, Faerie Queene. I think it's in Guyon's story.
It's in the first book:

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.


>100. This one I'm pretty sure is Larkin, the one about the trees growing leaves in spring.
Right. ‘The Trees’:

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

>>23374090
>65/100
Oh snap. This is further than usual.
And OP hasn't even dropped the pity hints of these are females or X or Y yet.

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>>23352571
>87)
This one is dated as the year 1778. I key clue!
If we then take the list of remaining authors we can easily filter it down to those born before 1778. leaving us only:
William Blake, William Congreve, Edward Dryer, John Gay, Oliver Goldsmith, John Webster and Thomas Wyatt (Lamb was born 1775, Wordsworth 1770 and Walter Scott 1771 but as they'd be 3, 8 and 7 years old we can exclude them)

7 choices. But if we dig closer, Walpole here addresses the person as you in the second person. This may be a leap of faith, but without the obvious quote of poetry I suspect the poet being referred to is one and the same as the recipient of the letter!
Congreve, Dryer, John Gay, Goldsmith, Webster, and Wyatt were all dead at this point!

This leaves only William Blake left who could possibly have received it!
A look at Blake's bibliography shows that by 1778 he had published nothing, but there was a collection of unpublished poems called Poetical Sketches he distributed in letters to friends!
Now there were many poems in this collection. So to dig deeper we see Walpole refer to the work as an "Act". Now while there were many poems in the collection there were dramatic fragments for plays Edward the Third and King Edward the Fourth.

Through this line of reasoning I have concluded that 87 refers to William Blakes blank verse dramatic fragments for his unfinished Edward the 3rd and 4th plays!

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>>23374503
>87)
>This one is dated as the year 1778. I key clue!
>If we then take the list of remaining authors we can easily filter it down to those born before 1778. leaving us only:
>William Blake, William Congreve, Edward Dryer, John Gay, Oliver Goldsmith, John Webster and Thomas Wyatt (Lamb was born 1775, Wordsworth 1770 and Walter Scott 1771 but as they'd be 3, 8 and 7 years old we can exclude them)
All sound reasoning. The quoted poet is indeed one of those seven.

>7 choices. But if we dig closer, Walpole here addresses the person as you in the second person. This may be a leap of faith, but without the obvious quote of poetry I suspect the poet being referred to is one and the same as the recipient of the letter!
The problem with leaps of faith is that sometimes the hoped-for landing-spot isn't there, and you disappear into the abyss. The letter was written to a Rev. William Mason, who had just sent Walpole part of a libretto. The quotation is in there.

> . . . This leaves only William Blake left who could possibly have received it!
>A look at Blake's bibliography shows . . .
“I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.” — Sherlock Holmes

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>>23374616
Damn. And I was set to do more with how in 68 Shakespeare would have been able to know about Dryer, Webster and Wyatt

>1
Petra by John William Burgon
>57
Snake by Emily Dickinson
>91
Requiem Robert Louis Stevenson

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>>23374896

3/3 here:


>1
>Petra by John William Burgon
Right. A sonnet sent in to a competition. "A rose-red city, half as old as time" is the last line. It's a great line but the rest is pretty mediocre.


>57
>Snake by Emily Dickinson
Yes, except it's called "A Narrow Fellow In The Grass". Another good last line (although in this case the whole poem is good too):

Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of Cordiality

But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.


>91
>Requiem Robert Louis Stevenson
Right. The aunt just swaps it around of course:

Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Bump

Bump

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Progress 68/100 but seems to have lost momentum. Several of those remaining are tricky admittedly (the poem is either obscure or well-hidden) but not all. Maybe it would help to break the task up, i.e. find which bit is the quotation and then try to identify it.

In these a whole line of the poem is quoted word for word:
10, 20, 31, 40, 46, 51, 53, 55, 66, 69, 71, 88

In these the poem is quoted accurately, but it's just a short phrase, not a whole line:
19, 26, 50, 65, 68, 82, 84

In these the poem is changed slightly:
32, 37, 85

In these it's changed quite a bit:
22, 41, 43, 54, 56, 67, 72, 80, 83, 87

>>23377558
>32
This was kind of easy to find since it is the name of the book so that if you look up the book blurbs will mention the title comes from Kingdom of God Francis Thompson.

>>23377943
Oh and to be clear I wasn't googling the quotes to find the sources. I was looking up the works since you provided the names, I was thinking you told us them for a reason to get more info on the works.

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>>23377943

>32
>Kingdom of God Francis Thompson.
Correct. Another of the lesser-known names out of the way:

The angels keep their ancient places;
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.


>I was thinking you told us them for a reason to get more info on the works.
Well the quiz isn't to identify them, so no harm done. It means if someone likes something it's easy to find the book.

It does mean you can eliminate poets who post-date the work in question, but that's not often a big help.

Bump.

>>23352477
Bump

Hmm . . . one more bump I guess.

>>23352477
Been hesitant with this batch, but here goes:
75. Don't know, but has a Wordsworth stealing the boat in Prelude ('promontory') feel about it, so that's a guess.
74. Keats
73. Burns
72. Neither a Whitcomb Riley nor a Whittier selection remains in the final availables list...and I'm pretty sure no pumpkins are on display at the Goblin Market. There's a Cullen Bryant available, and maybe a Pound alluding to perhaps Carlyle's most ridiculous essay 'potential' here, but no. Not bighting. Focusing on pumpkins was clearly the wrong strategy with this one.
71. I only know this because of the availables list, would have eluded me otherwise. Confess I was 'looking' for some variant of the few 'stoops to folly' lines in Vicar (ie TSE)-- but let's make this official: Goldsmith, the mad dog ditty.
70. Hmm. No Kit Marlowe available; this is either Webster or capped CM earlier.
69. Though a Wordsworth reality not a Wordsworth theme, really. I think Dyer has a poem with just this title. Where else could he be?
68. Were Nye Shakespeare's near contemporary I'd launch a guess....
67. uncertain coy impossible (or rather difficult) to please: Scott
66. Guess: Dylan Thomas. Larkin wasn't fond of many but he did like *this* old boy. Just *feels* like Thomas is drifting around in there, somewhere.
64. This is Gray but not Churchyard. Guessing this was long ago guessed, however.
62. Keats. One of the four or five I would've known sans list, but no doubt 'in the books' already
60. Shelley, explanation same supra; skipped 61 because knew it was gone as well: LC
59. Another Keats
57. Em D 'when a boy'
56. Chance! Gonna guess Hopkins on the strength of 'feathered ferns and drowsing dabbled blooms,' but hoping it's a half line, and...
Feels wrong now, however. Rats.
55. I feel that I know this but.. the tabula is rasa
52. Browning's Pippa
51. This is SS for the strong finish!
*** ***
Should I go back through and hunt for the Thompson, Marvell, (Goblin Market) &(Beggars Opera)? These are references I feel I should've spotted: Marvell's even among my favorites; I reread through ALL his poetry as lately as just less than a year ago!

Bump

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>>23382738

CORRECT BUT ALREADY FOUND:

>52. Browning's Pippa

>57. Em D 'when a boy'
It's titled "A Narrow Fellow In The Grass".

>59. Another Keats

>60. Shelley, explanation same supra;

>skipped 61 because knew it was gone as well: LC
Another anon did get this but only "the hard way" i.e. reading a book of all LC's verse.

>62. Keats. One of the four or five I would've known sans list

>64. This is Gray but not Churchyard.

>70. Hmm. No Kit Marlowe available; this is either Webster or capped CM earlier.
It is Marlowe. Faustus of course.

>73. Burns

>74. Keats


CORRECT AND NEW ADDITIONS:

>51. This is SS for the strong finish!
Not a finish when I put them in order, but yes, it's Sassoon. "Everyone Sang":

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom . . .


>67. uncertain coy impossible (or rather difficult) to please: Scott
It's from ‘Marmion’:

O woman! in our hours of ease
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made;
When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!


>69. I think Dyer has a poem with just this title.
Correct.

My mind to me a kingdom is;
Such perfect joy therein I find
That it excels all other bliss
Which God or nature hath assign'd.


>71. Goldsmith, the mad dog ditty.
"Elegy for a mad dog". "The man recovered from the bite / The dog it was that died."


THESE HAVE STUMPED YOU AND EVERYONE ELSE:

>55. I feel that I know this but.. the tabula is rasa
Not one of the guy's two super-famous lines, admittedly.

>56. Chance! Gonna guess Hopkins on the strength of 'feathered ferns and drowsing dabbled blooms,'
There might be more than one allusion here but "feathered ferns" isn't what I had in mind.

>66. Guess: Dylan Thomas.
Not DT. It's a "big name" poet who isn't known at all these days, it seems.

>Larkin wasn't fond of many but he did like *this* old boy.
It was Hardy that Larkin really loved.

>68. Were Nye Shakespeare's near contemporary I'd launch a guess....
There's a modern(ish) poet hiding in there.

>72. Focusing on pumpkins was clearly the wrong strategy with this one.
That's the right part to focus on, but the original doesn't have pumpkins.


ALREADY FOUND:

>75. Don't know, but has a Wordsworth stealing the boat in Prelude ('promontory') feel about it, so that's a guess.
"Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun" is from Thanatopsis.

>Marvell's even among my favorites
He's . . . well, let's just say he's old enough to drink alcohol in the USA.

>Thompson
The most recently found. A power of two.


So four new additions. 73/100. We might get there.

>>23383639
>There's a modern(ish) poet hiding in there.
Reading this got me thinking the quote wasn't any of the lines Shakespeare said but the narrator, since it'd be silly to have Shakespeare quote modern poets.
The line master of this craft or sullen art stood out to me. Some research and digging showed my hunch right with
In My Craft or Sullen Art by Dylan Thomas

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>>23383664
>In My Craft or Sullen Art by Dylan Thomas
Right.

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms


Quite well-hidden because of all the stuff above it, but still, it's a title, so it ought to snag the memory.

>>23352477
Well, I thought I'd read some poetry of the few (understatement) poets I was not familiar with on the availables list and the first to pop up for Burgon was Petra, and lo, that's number one-- 'solved,' I guess.
What a lovely little poem.

>>23374503
>>23352477
Feel guilty about this one, as the necessary leg work was done by the former number. Libretto brought 'Gay' to mind but.. I doubt seriously *any* Walpole would allude to him. Checked 'WC' against the most poetical passage in the missive, and voilà:
87. William Congreve

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>>23384921

>87. William Congreve
Correct. "Music hath charms to sooth the savage breast". From a play called "The Mourning Bride", which is also the source of "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned". No-one knows anything else he wrote, but two lines that live four hundred years shouldn't be sneezed at.

>>23384921
>tfw my post wasn't completely dumb and a waste but helped eventually another find the answer
Nice

>>23352477
Which ones aren’t answered yet?

>>23385745
Yeah, you did a really good job breaking it down, then setting it up. What I happened to know was that Gay's Beggars' Opera massively satired Horace Walpole's father, Robert, and that Congreve was the only other librettist of the bunch (though known chiefly as a dramatist, of course).

>>23385763
Current progress: 75/100

Unanswered:
10
19, 20
22
26
31
37, 40
41, 43
46, 50
53, 54, 55
56
65
66
72
80
82, 83, 84, 85
88


Poets available:

William Blake, Rupert Brooke x 2, Robert Browning x 4
Padraic Colum
Robert Frost
John Gay
G. M. Hopkins
Robinson Jeffers
Charles Lamb
John Masefield
Christina Rossetti
Walter Scott, Stevie Smith, Algernon Charles Swinburne
Alfred Lord Tennyson x 3
John Webster, William Wordsworth x 2, Thomas Wyatt

>>23385948
Thanks, anon. Will give these a look when I get home a little later.
t. not the anon who posted the request

>see Robert Browning is 4 of the 25
>surely one must be Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
>pull up a copy and read it
>can't find any signs of it in any of the quotes
Well fuck. I still think Childe Roland is to be found somewhere there. Just might be subtle. Gonna keep looking.

>>23352527
>50)
>The very sound of them makes me feel like skipping off to a dance.
Speaking of Robert Browning just going to guess here, but this doesn't happen to be a reference this poem Pied Piper of Hamelin where the sound from his pipe has all the children skip off and dance away with him?
It's a long shot but may as well give it a guess.

>>23387056
>I still think Childe Roland is to be found somewhere there.
He isn't.

>>23387081
>50)
>Pied Piper
Nope. Not Browning either.


All the outstanding Browning quotations are from short or short-ish poems. (Pippa Passes is quite long, but that one has already been found.) No-one has to wade through The Ring and the Book or Sordello.

I didn't go out of my way to pick obscure things, but of course anything is obscure if you haven't encountered it. Browning does often sound quite "un-poetic", so in his case it might be slightly harder to identify which parts of the extracts are the quotations. As Oscar Wilde quipped, "Browning used poetry as a medium for writing in prose".

>>23387187
Well I'll be. All these Browning references and none to the big old Childe Roland.

>20
>Long live freedom and damn the ideologies
The Stars Go Over the Lonely Ocean
Robinson Jeffers

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>>23387639
>20
>The Stars Go Over the Lonely Ocean
>Robinson Jeffers
Correct. A fine poem which everyone should be familiar with. We'll even depart from our normal Cute Anime Girl to honour the subject-matter.

“Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies,”
Said the gamey black-maned boar
Tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.

best thread on /lit/ right now, thank you OP. i am sitting quietly on my fourth day of class while the more studied students respond to the professor, so to speak

Bump.

>>23385948
Is 54 John Gay The Painter Who Pleased Nobody and Everybody?

bump

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>>23389610
>54
>John Gay
>The Painter Who Pleased Nobody and Everybody
Correct.

Lest men suspect your tale untrue,
Keep probability in view.
The traveller leaping o’er those bounds,
The credit of his book confounds.
Who with his tongue hath armies routed,
Makes even his real courage doubted:
But flattery never seems absurd;
The flattered always take your word:
Impossibilities seem just;
They take the strongest praise on trust.

Bump.