English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Quotes

“Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets
themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.”
― C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

“Nearly all our older poetry was written and read by men to whom the distinction between poetry and rhetoric, in its modern form, would have been meaningless. The 'beauties' which they chiefly regarded in every composition were those which we either dislike or simply do not notice.
This change of taste makes an invisible wall between us and them.”
― C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

“The history of literature is very far from being one of simple progress.”
― C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

“In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people.”
― C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

“Attempts to connect men's circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful.”
― C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

“It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist.”
― C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

“Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.”
― C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama

“Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.”
― C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama