“Contemplate a thing with all your powers—intellectual and moral—at…” — Sydney Dobell

“Contemplate a thing with all your powers—intellectual and moral—at once, and find a word or phrase that is the algebraic expression of that combination of forces and you speak Poetry.”

Describing poetry as concentrated expression of the whole perceiving mind · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

Poetry
Truth

Sydney Dobell

About 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…

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