| Author Quoted | Frank Laurence Lucas |
| Title Quoted | Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1941/10/11 |
| Imprint | [S.l.] : [s.n.]. 1936 |
| Quotation | "I like Blake often, but I like Hardy better." This, which is not the best written short sentence in the English language either (the lack of logical correspondence between "often" and "better" is an offensive sloppiness) is one of a million clues to what is wrong with F. L. Lucas' Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal: that, and his naive idea, somewhere, that Blake was a diabolist. Lucas is smart enough to see what is obviously wrong with Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, but not smart enough to see what is obviously right about Coleridge and Blake-to whom he is capable of preferring bleak, pompous, pedestrian dullards like Housman or Hardy who are about as interesting to me as a cold in the head. |
| Quotation Source | Run to the mountain: The Story of a Vocation. The journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 1, 1939-1941.; Edited by Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1995, p. 436-37 |
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| Link to Merton's Copy |
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