| Author Quoted | Coventry Patmore |
| Title Quoted | Poems |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1941/09/26 |
| Imprint | |
| Quotation | In spite of a stupid, pompous, inanity stuck in the front of the Phoenix Library Edition of [Coventry] Patmore's Poems, I have again made some kind of effort to read him but I guess it's no use. The quotation which should have kept me out of the book in the first place is: "I have respected posterity; and should there be a posterity which care for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me!" It is enough to make you want to throw the book on the floor and stamp on it. I give up wondering what he could possibly mean by "I have respected posterity." But if he does mean anything by it at all, as for instance "I have worried a lot about whether or not I would be remembered after I died," then he is confessing himself to be a man with very trivial concerns. |
| 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. 410 |
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| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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