The quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (French: querelle des Anciens et des Modernes) was a literary and artistic debate that heated up in the early 1690s and shook the Académie française.
Read more about Quarrel Of The Ancients And The Moderns: Debate in France, Assessment, Analogous British Debate
Famous quotes containing the words quarrel of the, quarrel, ancients and/or moderns:
“The quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves,
The full round moon and the star-laden sky,
And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves,
Had hid away earth’s old and weary cry.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“This was the merriest old man that we had ever seen, and one of the best preserved. His style of conversation was coarse and plain enough to have suited Rabelais. He would have made a good Panurge. Or rather he was a sober Silenus, and we were the boys Chromis and Mnasilus, who listened to his story.... There was a strange mingling of past and present in his conversation, for he had lived under King George, and might have remembered when Napoleon and the moderns generally were born.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)