 | Robert Atwan, Laurance Wieder - 1993 - 514 pages
...high He sought the storms; but for a calm unfit, Would steer too nigh the sands, to boast his wit. Great wits are sure to madness near allied; And thin partitions do their bounds divide: Else, why should he, with wealth and honor blessed, Refuse his age the needful hours of rest? Punish... | |
 | John E. Nelson - 1994 - 472 pages
...favor of theory alone. The English poet John Dryden reflected this popular viewpoint when he wrote: Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide. We may wonder if Shakespeare was speaking from experience when he wrote in A Midsummer Night's Dream:... | |
 | Bertram Wyatt-Brown - 1994 - 140 pages
...popular myths or poetic conceits about such a connection have a validity which is hard to challenge. "Great wits are sure to madness near allied; / and thin partitions do their bounds divide," wrote John Dryden, versifying the notion in the seventeenth century. "Study after study," reported... | |
 | Margaret A. Boden - 1996 - 260 pages
...respect to certain personality traits, but certainly does not claim identity; it agrees with Dryden that "great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide." This puts the case very neatly; not identity, but "near alliance," with their bounds being divided... | |
 | Professor Roger Poole, Roger Poole - 1995 - 324 pages
...being baffled by his own evidence, and come to the conclusion that Dryden was right when he wrote: Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide. The judgement, in its curiously deliberate (self-imposed) insensitivity, does form a part of the larger... | |
 | Jonathan Keates - 1996 - 332 pages
...disdain for that rationality to which the contemporary ethos increasingly clung. Dryden's famous lines: Great wits are sure to madness near allied And thin partitions do their bounds divide may have achieved cliche status since they were written, but their implication for Purcell's age was... | |
 | R.F Mould - 1996 - 518 pages
...Pope must have known someone like this when he penned those immortal lines in his Essay on Criticism: 'Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide'. Here indeed is a great wit. On health: 'Muddy' look could indicate changes in the writer's emotional... | |
 | Robert Andrews - 1997 - 666 pages
...recognizes genius. ARTHUR CONAN, SIR DOYLE, (1859-1930) British author. The Valley of Fear, ch. 1 (1915). 6 Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide. JOHN DRYDEN, (1631-1700) British poet, dramatist, critic. Absalom and Achitophel, pt. 1,1. 163^1(1681).... | |
 | Gregory Maertz - 1998 - 280 pages
...territory. The dangerous proximity prompted John Dryden's well-known couplet on the Earl of Shaftesbury: "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide" (Absalom and Achitophel, 163-64). Prior to the eighteenth century, the furor poeticus was posited in... | |
 | Noel L. Brann - 2002 - 530 pages
...reaffirmed by John Dryden in the asseveration contained in his Absalom and Architophel (I, 163) that "great wits are sure to madness near allied, /And thin partitions do their bounds divide." Putting the same notion into prose form in the following century, Denis Diderot exulted at the pinnacle... | |
| |
Great wits are sure to madness near allied; And thin partitions do their bounds divide: Else why should he, with wealth and honour blest, Refuse his age the needful hours of rest? 
