“Every successful novelist must be more or less a poet, even although he may never have written a line of verse. The quality of imagination is absolutely indispensable to him: his accurate power of examining and embodying human character and human passion, as well as the external face of nature, is not less essential; and the talent of describing well what he feels with acuteness, added to the above requisites, goes far to complete the poetic character.”
Walter Scott, Lives of the Novelists (courtesy of Richard Zuelch)
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
An ArtsJournal Blog