Prose, for example, was for him simply less enchanting than verse: he once claimed that reading Plato gave him a headache, and it is not easy to know exactly what sort of joke that was.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, August 03, 2024
A Headache
Richard Hunter and Peter Parsons, "Colin François Lloyd Austin
1941–2010," Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy XIV (2015) 3-12 (at 11):