Quotes by Vasily Zhukovsky

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Each reader, being the critic of the poet, is also the judge of the man, and woe to the poet, if the assent of the judge will not be as significant for him as that of the critic!

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The art of versification tells the poet what he must do as an artist; but the poet, precisely because he is a poet, doesn't he have other obligations? Does he cease to be a man... a member of society. And son of the country? Can he say to himself: I will destroy all my other relationships, maybe I will be only a poet? And if he cannot annihilate these relations, can he neglect the obligations necessarily connected with them? And what reader will want to discover in the poet this arbitrary rupture with himself?...