Chris Baterna’s Reviews > Five Centuries of English Verse, Impressions, Vol. 2 of 2: Wordsworth to Tennyson; Revised Edition of "the Poets: Chaucer to Tennyson Impressions" > Status Update

Definitely gonna get into Thomas Hood

On Milman: "He strikes a single key continually, though one of dignity and power"
On Keble: "he does violence to his own sweet nature in dogmatizing to the young..." "the piety, which is the one motive of his verse, is wanting in passion Poetry demands the sacrifice of the privacy of souls"
On Newman: He on his part was as resolved to keep its action subservient to an obligation he regarded as sovereign."

Shelley: "He himself had too much to say, and felt too ardently, to care to stop and meditate.""His besetting fault as a poet is excess.""It was a strange universe, paradoxically monstrous, as paradoxically ideal as which spread before the poet's eyes."
Keats: "In defiance he set up the image of Beauty to be worshipped."
Wolfe: "his nature was too much of a poem for his work not to be classed by his personality."

On Wordsworth: "Listen finally to the two emulous spiritual rivals for control of Wordsworth's soul - Thought the profoundest, Imagination at its loveliest..."
On Landor: "Genius owes it to itself, to the world, to show the utmost it can do, to set itself difficult tasks, to climb high peaks which lead nowhere, for the attainment of ends apparently profitless."

Stebbing is delivering banger after banger on Wordsworth and Coleridge.
[On the problem of many poets]: "Often it is preaching instead of singing."
"Imagination itself effloresces into a confusing exuberance - fancy upon fancy - reflection upon reflection."
[On Coleridge]: Nature had bestowed the gift of verse upon him as his proper mode of expression; and he used it as lightly as he came by it.