'It was a dark and stormy night' is, in fact, the beginning of a much longer sentence that open the novel Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Eliot observed: 'One of the most thrilling lines in King Lear is the simple, 'Never, never, never, never, never,' but apart from a knowledge of the context, how can you say that it is poetry, or even competent verse?' So it is with 'It was a dark and stormy night.' To talk about that famous sentence, we have to talk about its context.īecause here's the thing: on its own, it's not that bad a line. So how about the quintessential bad opening line? It was a dark and stormy night. Request: You mentioned, back in the Opening Lines index post, that you might be open to the idea of doing some bad literature. This blog is undergoing revision a temporary archive of Opening Line posts can be found here.
