Secondary Modern

Famous quotes containing the words secondary and/or modern:

    Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn,
    Hill-scholar, man that never is,
    The bad-bespoken lacker,
    Ancestor of Narcissus, prince
    Of the secondary men. There are no rocks
    And stones, only this imager.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)