Significant Cultural or Contemporary Impacts
- One of his best known poems was an exhortation "Against Idleness and Mischief" in Divine Songs for Children, a poem which was famously parodied by Lewis Carroll in his book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in the poem "How Doth the Little Crocodile", which is now better known than the original. In the 1850 novel David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, school master Dr. Strong quotes from Watts' "Against Idleness and Mischief": "Satan finds some mischief still, for idle hands to do."
- In the 1884 comic opera called Princess Ida, there is a punning reference to Watts in Act I. At Princess Ida's women's university no males of any kind are allowed, and the Princess's father, King Gama, relates that "She'll scarcely suffer Dr. Watts' 'hymns'".
- Isaac Watts is commemorated in the Church of England, the Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on 25 November and in the Episcopal Church (USA) on 26 November.
Read more about this topic: Isaac Watts
Famous quotes containing the words significant, cultural, contemporary and/or impacts:
“As between these two, the need that in its haste to be abolished cannot pause to be stated and the need that is the absolute predicament of particular human identity, one does not presume to suggest a relation of worth. Yet the distinction is perhaps not idle, for it is from the failure to make it that proceeds the common rejection as “obscure” of most that is significant in modern music, painting and literature.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable in contemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization ...”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence.... The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)