Wordsworth quotes

Wordsworth says somewhere that wherever Virgil seems to have composed 'with his eye on the object', Dryden fails to render him. Homer invariably composes 'with his eye onthe object', whether the object be moral or a material one: Pope composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates his object, whatever it is.

- Matthew Arnold
On Translating Homer, lecture1.

   Let simple Wordsworth chime his childish verse, And brother Coleridge lull the babe at nurse.

-Rochdale
  English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, l.917^18.

Mr Wordsworth'sgeniusisa pure emanationofthe Spirit ofthe Age.Had helived inanyother period of the world, he would never have been heard of.

-William Hazlitt
  Spirit of the Age,'Mr Wordsworth'.

Thisgreat College, of this ancient University, has seen some strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. And here am I, a better poet than Porson, and a better scholar than Wordsworth, betwixt and between.

- A(lfred) E(dward) Housman
  Speech on taking up the Chair of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

- Philip Arthur Larkin
  Required Writing.

Two voices are there: one is of the deep; It learns the storm-clouds thundrous melody, Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea, Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep: And one is of an old half-witted sheep Which bleats articulate monotony, And indicates that two and one are three, That grass isgreen, lakes damp, and mountains steep And,Wordsworth, both are thine.

-J(ames) K(enneth) Stephen
  Lapsus Calami,'A Sonnet'.