William Morris

I do not know that he had other favorites among the poets, but he had favorite poems which he liked to read to you, and he read, of course, splendidly.

I have forgotten what piece of John Hayes it was that he liked so much, but I remembered how he fiercely reveled in the vengefulness of William Morris's Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast.

and how he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the supposed speaker's joy in slaying the murderer of his brother i am threescore years and ten and my hair is nigh turn'd gray but i'm glad to think of the moment when i took his life away Generally I fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great, and I do not believe he cared much for the conventionally accepted masterpieces of literature.

He liked to find out good things and great things for himself.

There they abode a whole day, yet warily, since, though there were no waged men at arms in the stead, they went about many stout carles, who all bore long quittles, and looked as if their bills and bows had not been far to seek, but no strife betid.

William Morris, The Sundering Flood, footnote 1, page 11.

But this Anglo-Saxon proclivity is not the only type of such error.

There is an opposite tendency which takes the form of a Latinization of language, and of this style Johnson is perhaps the most outstanding example in our literature.

he married the daughter of a great and poetical artist, Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

He has written The Life of William Morris, which I think is one of the best biographies in the language, in its fine proportion, its seriousness, its vividness, and indeed all his writing has the true poetical quality.

I hope he even contrived to communicate it to his departmental work in the Board of Education.

He says in the preface to his lectures, poetry is the controller of sullen care and frantic passion it is the companion and youth of desire and love it is the power which in later years dispels the ills of life labor penury pain disease sorrow death itself it is the inspiration from youth to age and in all times and lands of the noblest human motives and ardors of glory of generous shame of freedom and the unconquerable mind in these fine sentences it will be seen that mr mackayle makes a very high and majestic claim indeed for poetry no less than the claim of art, chivalry, patriotism, love, and religion all rolled into one.

It feels good to GEICO.

The rapture of perceiving a beautiful subject and the pleasure of expressing it as finely and delicately as one can.

I have given it up because, as William Morris once said of himself, quote, to make poetry just for the sake of making it is a crime for a man of my age and experience, end quote.

one's feelings lose poetic flow soon after twenty-seven or so one begins to think of experience in a different sort of way not as a series of glowing points and pictures which outline themselves radiantly upon a duller background but as a rich full thing like a great tapestry all of which is important if it is not all beautiful it is not that the marvel and wonder of life is less but it is more equable more intricate more mysterious it does not rise at times like a sea into great crested breakers but it comes marching in evenly roller after roller as far as the eye can reach and then too poetry becomes cramped and confined for all that one desires to say one lived life as a young man rather for the sake of the emotions which occasionally transfigured it with a priestly sense of its occasional splendor there was not time to be leisurely humorous gently interested But as we grow older, we perceive that poetical emotion is but one of many forces, and our sympathy grows and extends itself in more directions.

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Foreword by William Morris.

Ralph Robinson's translation of More's Utopia would not need any foreword if it were to be looked upon merely as a beautiful book embodying the curious fancies of a great writer and thinker of the period of the Renaissance.

No doubt till within the last few years it has been considered by the moderns as nothing more serious than a charming literary exercise, spiced with the interest given to it by the allusions to the history of the time and by our knowledge of the career of its author.

In the meantime accept my goodwill, and so farewell.

Imprinted at London, in Paul's Churchyard, at the signe of the Lamb, by Abraham Weale, 1556.

Now revised by F. S. Ellis and printed again by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, Hammersmith, in the county of Middlesex.

Finished the fourth day of August, 1893.

Thou and thy brethren sure did gain that thing for which I long in vain, the spell whereby the mist of fear was melted, and your ears might hear earth's voices as they are indeed.

William Morris, prefix to his translation of the Edda Biggia Saga.

So wrote William Morris in the preface to his English version of one of the finest sagas of the fearful land, and his words may serve as a clue to guide us to the heart of our present theme, for no other English poet has felt so keenly the power of Norse myth.

None has done so much to restore its terrible beauty, its heroism, its earth-shaking humour, and its heights of tragic passion and pathos to a place in our memories and a home in our hearts.

I say to restore, for it will not be, in truth, a new gift, but in some sort the recovery of a vanished and forgotten possession.

The mythic stories which we call Norse were in great part a common heritage of the Germanic peoples, and the tale of the Volsungs, which Morris told the other day, had been sung twelve or thirteen hundred years before in the Old English epic of Beowulf.

But between the day when these tales were last chanted at English feasts, perhaps on the eve of the conquest, and that on which they were first deciphered again by English antiquaries, life will be six centuries, during most of which they were utterly unknown.

We are like kindred, parted in infancy to meet again as perfect strangers in advanced age.

But in the end Sidney Olivier consented to take Zola, I consented to take Ibsen, Hubert Blond undertook to read all the socialist novels of the day, an enterprise the desperate failure of which resulted in the most amusing paper of the series.

William Morris, asked to read a paper on himself, flatly declined, but gave us one on Gothic architecture.

Stepniak also came to the rescue with a lecture on modern Russian fiction.

And so the Society tided over the summer without having to close its doors, but also without having added anything whatever to the general stock of information on Socialism and Contemporary Literature.