The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University

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Author QuotedFrank Laurence Lucas
Title QuotedDecline 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 SourceRun 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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