Talbot Hook

“It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh

“I see you still stand a little in awe of opinion. Never fear that. The strength of criticism lies only in the weakness of the thing criticised.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh

“How often, ah, how often, between the desire of the heart and its fulfilment, lies only the briefest space of time and distance, and yet the desire remains forever unfulfilled! It is so near that we can touch it with the hand, and yet so far away that the eye cannot perceive it. What Mr. Churchill most desired was before him. The Romance he was longing to find and record had really occurred in his neighborhood, among his own friends. It had been set like a picture into the frame-work of his life, enclosed within his own experience. But he could not see it is as an object apart from himself; and as he was gazing at what was remote and strange and indistinct, the nearer incidents of aspiration, love, and death, escaped him. They were too near to be clothed by the imagination with the golden vapors of romance; for the familiar seems trivial, and only the distant and unknown completely fill and satisfy the mind.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh

“Certain brilliantly intellectual writers are not treated as intellectual writers because they don’t observe the correct forms: their poetry may be deeply learned and sophisticated, informed by quite radical rethinking of philosophical issues, but if the style of the poems is too lively, too grammatically clear, if it is not, on the surface, difficult, it does not conform to established definitions of intellectual daring.”
― Louise Glück, American Originality: Essays on Poetry