Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to each ot...her, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or hundred years gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant. Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first. But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was ...wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D'Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And deck the bananas in leaves Plucked from the Carib trees,... Fibrous and dangling down, Oozing cantankerous gum Out of their purple maws....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxu...ry. But the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much mor...e of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray! Our summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced towards its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of age.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The feminization of America has made emotions sacrosanct while condemning as cold and unfeeling rigorous concepts such as duty and... honor. Propelled by incessant hosannas to woman's "finer" this and "softer" that, we make emotional decisions instead of ethical ones and then congratulate ourselves for having "heart."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »