And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.
I've forgotten lines all the time. Sometimes I switch verses in a song. It's just hard not to when you're doing the same thing all the time.
You praise, in three hundred verses, Sabellus, the baths of Ponticus, who gives such excellent dinners. You wish to dine, Sabellus, not to bathe.
Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.
But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.
I don't care whether you are me or Michael Jordan, it makes no difference we are all going to feel that way but it is what we do about what we feel that isn't comfortable that separates the people who do really well verses the people who just meek out existence.
It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.
Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see the sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani.
I am reading Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric.
