Significant Cultural or Contemporary Impacts
- One of his best known poems was an exhortation "Against Idleness and Mischief" in Divine Songs for Children, a poem which was famously parodied by Lewis Carroll in his book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in the poem "How Doth the Little Crocodile", which is now better known than the original. In the 1850 novel David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, school master Dr. Strong quotes from Watts' "Against Idleness and Mischief": "Satan finds some mischief still, for idle hands to do."
- In the 1884 comic opera called Princess Ida, there is a punning reference to Watts in Act I. At Princess Ida's women's university no males of any kind are allowed, and the Princess's father, King Gama, relates that "She'll scarcely suffer Dr. Watts' 'hymns'".
- Isaac Watts is commemorated in the Church of England, the Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on 25 November and in the Episcopal Church (USA) on 26 November.
Read more about this topic: Isaac Watts
Famous quotes containing the words significant, cultural, contemporary and/or impacts:
“For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
“By Modernism I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in novelty for its own sake, in the idea that progress through time equates with cultural progress; in the cult of individuality, originality and self-expression.”
—Dan Cruickshank (b. 1949)
“This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent revolution, as yet unknown to us.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence.... The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)