Writers On Writers – Late Edition of Stilletos and Claws

I was a little sidetracked Friday, and only now realized that I hadn’t shared more cutting comments from famous writers. So without any more delay, here they are:

“With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his… It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”
- George Bernard Shaw, on William Shakespeare

“The verses, when they were written, resembled nothing so much as spoonfuls of boiling oil, ladled out by a fiendish monkey at an upstairs window upon such of the passers-by whom the wretch had a grudge against.”
- Lytton Strachey, on Alexander Pope

“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
- Oscar Wilde, on Alexander Pope

“Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.”
- Samuel Johnson, on Milton’s Paradise Lost

“Mrs Browning’s death is rather a relief to me, I must say. No more Aurora Leighs, thank God!”
- Edward Fitzgerald, British poet, on Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“Of all bitches alive or dead, a scribbling woman is the most canine.”
- Lord Byron, on Anna Seward

“Of Byron one can say, as of no other English poet of his eminence, that he added nothing to the language, that he discovered nothing in the sounds, and developed nothing in the meaning, of individual words.”
- T.S. Eliot, on Lord Byron

“One could always baffle Conrad by saying ‘humour’.”
- H.G. Wells, on Joseph Conrad

“I have discovered that our great favourite, Miss Austen, is my countrywoman … with whom mamma before her marriage was acquainted. Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband hunting butterfly she ever remembers.”
- Mary Russell Mitford, letter to Sir William Elford, on Jane Austen

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