In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
What I find remarkable is that so much of the 18th century literature that I read is more accessible than reading your alternative weekly from ten years ago. People really aspired to write clearly.
But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.
Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.
All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.
German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.
The most valuable writers are those in whom we find not themselves, or ourselves, or the fugitive era of their lifetimes, but the common vision of all times.
In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.
Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer.
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.