The bad lover, like the bad poet, perhaps because of a preoccupation with self, is essentially inattentive, doesn't listen, doesn'...t anticipate. Or, just as bad, proceeds by rote, first this thing and then the next, and therefore leaves no opportunity for discovery, or departure. Form to me implies an alertness to the demands of your material and an orchestration of effects. It is some happy combination of the poet's intent and the poem's esprit and the necessary compromises between the two. We can't be too willful, but we must have things in mind. We don't want to be the wimps of our own poems, but we'd be happy to be led into some lovely places. And we'd like to have some control after we lose control, at least enough to throw light on what has just hap pened, perhaps even to articulate what it has meant to us. And of course there are moments when we'd be better off being appreciatively silent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit,... Felt in the tingling bruises of collision, And known to captains as esprit de corps.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though the country seemed so new, and no house was observed by us, shut in between the banks that sunny day, we did not have to tr...avel far to find where men inhabited, like wild bees, and had sunk wells in the loose sand and loam of the Merrimack. There dwelt the subject of the Hebrew scriptures, and the Esprit de Lois, where a thin, vaporous smoke curled up through the noon. All that is told of mankind, of the inhabitants of the Upper Nile, and the Sunderbunds, and Timbuctoo, and the Orinoko, was experience here. Every race and class of men was represented.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If young gentlemen get from their years in college only manliness, esprit de corps, a release of their social gifts, a training in... give and take, a catholic taste in men and the standards of true sportsmen, they have gained much but they have not gained what a college should give them. It should give them insight into the things of the mind and the spirit ... the consciousness of having taken on them the vows of true enlightenment and of having undergone the discipline, never to be shaken off, of those who seek wisdom in candor, with faithful labor and travail of spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The literary female, unsatisfied, agitated, empty in her heart and belly, always listening with pained curiosity to the imperative... which whispers out of the depths of her organism, "aut liberi aut libri"Mthe literary female, sufficiently educated to understand the voice of nature even when it speaks Latin, and yet sufficiently vain and goose enough to speak secretly to herself in French, "je me verrai, je me lirai, je m'extasierai et je dirai: Possible, que j'aie eu tant d'esprit?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »