Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Poetry
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- "A poem should not mean, but be."
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Ars Poetica
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Archibald McLeish
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- St. Augustine: "Poetry is the Devil's wine."
- Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society: "We don't
read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members
of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business,
engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry,
beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, O
me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless
-- of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?; Answer:
That you are here -- that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and
you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"
- Shelley: "Didactic poetry is my
abhorrence."
- Leslie Weatherhead: "The poet writes, not to
give the world ideas or to teach lessons, but simply because he is moved by an inward
compulsion which urges him to creative art. My passions raged like so many devils,
writes Burns in a letter, till they got vent in rhyme... We enter into truth,
perhaps, but through the door of beauty. We do not so much learn; we see... Moreover,
there is something felt, of which ordinary folk are conscious, but which they
cannot explain... So Arnold ... says of Byron: ... He taught us little; but our soul
had felt him like the thunder's roll... If the poet can be said to have a motive,
then it is aesthetic desire... [if it has a] purpose, it is to give pleasure. In some
moment of poetic insight he has seen a vision of the infinite, and he craves so to express
that experience that it may be shared... All poetry, said Browning, is the
problem of getting the infinite into the finite."
- Byron: "Poetry is the lava of the
imagination whose eruption prevents the earthquake."
- Leslie Weatherhead: "Keats ... says that a
poet should have no opinions, no principles, no morality, no self. To be tied to these
things spoils true art, which should be entirely unfettered. The poet should make a clean
sweep of his personal hopes ... and beliefs. Keats was so desirous of being the
consummate artist that he did not want private ideas and ethical principles to spoil his
poems, as the wire support of the florist sometimes spoils the beauty of the natural curve
in the stem of a flower. He wanted to present his poem just as it came to him from God... One does not so much want to learn what Browning's private opinions were.
One wants to know what Browning saw in his hours of poetic vision, and one wants to see
through his eyes. We should therefore be guarded in speaking of the value
of the work of the poet, just as we should speak guardedly of the value of a
sunset... the poet is a teacher in one sense ... but he is not the pedagogue... he exists not to inculcate ideas as a teacher, but to reveal reality."
- Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire: "We are the leaves of one
branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden."
- Charles Lamb: "The true poet dreams, being
awake."
- Shelley: Poetry "acts in a divine and
unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness."
- Leslie Weatherhead: [The poet] "is not sure
of a truth because he has proved it [by logical argument], but because he has seen
it. Indeed, in some moments of rapture he has experienced it... Aristotle, in the Poetics,
believed poetry to be inspired, and to imply either a strain of madness or a happy
gift of nature; and he divides poetry into the ecstatic [a "standing
out" of oneself] and the euplastic [easily or commonly formed]. It is the
ecstatic poet [who] requires explanation. The poet, inspired by some vivid experience,
goes into a kind of trance -- we think the phrase is not too strong -- and thereupon sees
a vision which he expresses in poetical ideas, that those who read may have that
experience re-created in them... It is because of this different way
of arriving at truth, we think, that the poet has so often led the way in expressing ideas
which are among the most profound [and] cherished by mankind. On the wings of vision the
poet soars to a pinnacle of truth... It may be that the poet's creation ... may
point to some as yet unrealized desire of humanity, for which the poet, as a prophet of
the race, yearns. So Shelley says ... They are the dreams of what ought to be, or may
be."
- Bacon: [The use of poetry] "hath been to
give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of
things doth deny it."
- Keats: "What the imagination seizes as
beauty must be truth."
- Leslie Weatherhead: "Christ's authority was the inward
authority of truth, and its weight lay in the people's own intuitive appreciation of
truth. He did not argue, but when He spoke, something in the hearer
leaped up in recognition of the truth... [in this sense the] ecstatic poet sees...
Then, with Wordsworth, We see into the life of things."
- Leslie Weatherhead: "Men discount the
dreamer as they discount their own dreams. They call him mad. He is mad, in a
sense, as the lover is mad, who also makes his choice and arrives at conclusions, not by
conscious argument, but by intuitions which, possibly, well up from the unconscious. But his dreams, his visionary thoughts, are the source of all poetry,
and make poets, as Shelley said: ...the hierophants [ancient priests whose duty
it was to reveal mysteries] of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the
gigantic shadows futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they
understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the
influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
world."
- George Harrison: "Sunrise doesn't
last all morning, a cloudburst doesn't last all day, seems my love is up and has left you
with no warning. It's not always going to be this grey. All things must pass, all things
must pass away."
-
William Butler
Yeats (1865-1939):
THE
SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The
Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a
vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my
sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion
body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and
pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs,
while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant
desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I
know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at
last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The above poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath
of the
first World War.
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