We may suspect that makers of jokes and smart remarks resemble poets at least in this, that they too would be excluded from Plato'...s Republic; for it is of the nature of Utopia and the Crystal Palace, as Dostoevsky said, that you can't stick your tongue out at it. A joke expresses tension, which it releases in laughter; it is a sort of permissible rebellion against things as they are--permissible, perhaps, because this rebellion is at the same time stoically resigned, it acknowledges that things are as they are, and that they will, after the moment of laughter, continue to be that way. That is why jokes concentrate on the most sensitive areas of human concern: sex, death, religion, and the most powerful institutions of society; and poems do the same.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want t...heir work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to h...ave a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their firs...t purpose?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine... in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present--henceforth?--the subject to which you are condemned.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application--why, th...e novel is practically the retail business all over again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ordinary night was graced For them by the swift tide of blood... That silently they took at flood, And for a little time they prized Themselves emparadised.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Valery ... said that prose was walking, poetry dancing. Indeed, the original two terms, prosus and versus meant, respectively, "go...ing straight forth" and "returning," and that distinction does point up the tendency of poetry to incremental repetition, variation, and the treatment of different themes in a single form. Robert Frost said shrewdly that poetry was what got left behind in translation, which suggests a criterion of almost scientific refinement: when in doubt, translate; whatever is left over is poetry, whatever gets through is prose. And yet even to so cagy a definition the great exception is a resounding one: some of the greatest poetry we have is the Authorized Version of the Bible, which is not only a translation but also, as to its appearance in print, identifiable neither with verse nor with prose in English but rather with cadence compounded of both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »