“A tree is a good illustration of the Law of a Poem, but the higher…” — Sydney Dobell | V2Melody

“A tree is a good illustration of the Law of a Poem, but the higher forms of creation are better.”

Comparing artistic unity with the organic unity of living nature · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

About Sydney Dobell

Sydney Dobell

5 April 1824–22 August 1874

Sydney Thompson Dobell was born on 5 April 1824 at Cranbrook in Kent, into a family whose circumstances placed him close to the commercial and dissenting middle-class culture of provincial England rather than to the aristocratic literary world. His father, Thomas Dobell, was a wine merchant, and the business of…

More by Sydney Dobell

Poems by Sydney Dobell

More remarks by Sydney Dobell

“The nature of poetry is precisely the question that underlies the most difficult and serious questions that concern the human mind.”

Treating poetic theory as inseparable from fundamental questions of thought and feeling · Letter home, 1857

Poetry
Truth

“Few words are used in their central sense: in innumerable cases an accidental sense having become the accepted meaning. Poets restore the central sense.”

On poetry's power to recover the force hidden inside familiar words · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

Poetry
Truth

“The first condition of real success in any natural science is, that it be approached devoutly, in the attitude not of the dogmatist but of the disciple.”

Urging humility before evidence and the natural world · Notes of an Address to Medical Students, 1856