“It is probable that human Memory, in all cases, follows, with more or…” — Sydney Dobell | V2Melody

“It is probable that human Memory, in all cases, follows, with more or less ability, the laws of Poetic Imagination—omitting and rearranging according to Unity.”

Linking memory with the selective and ordering work of imagination · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art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

“Love, the passion towards unity, is a direct agitation in the thing seeking unity, and differs, therefore, in its diagnosis as the thing differs.”

Defining love as a movement towards unity whose form depends on the lover · Unpublished notes, Beauty, Love, Order, Unity

Love

“I always think the monetary part of such matters to be rather—as in case of a physician's fee—the recognition of an insoluble debt, or the algebraic sign of an unknown quantity, than a mercantile correlation of value to value.”

Seeing payment as an acknowledgement of gratitude rather than a true measure of value · Letter to Rev. E. Harris, 24 April 1871

“There is a poetical as well as a moral hypocrisy: and it is possible for the literary as well as the moral Pharisee to make void the living Law through dead tradition.”

Warning that inherited forms can become empty when detached from living truth · Lecture, Nature of Poetry, 1857

Poetry
Truth