I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a "suspension of belief." A poet must never make a statement simply because i...t is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Destitution is the Muse of her genius,--Destitution and Death. I used to propose that her epitaph should be: "Here lies the angel ...of Death." And wonderfully as she varies and poetically repeats that image in every page and day, yet not less fondly and sublimely she returns to the other,--the grandeur of humility and privation, as thus: "The chief witness which I have had of a Godlike principle of action and feeling is the disinterested joy felt in others' superiority. For the love of superior virtue is mine own gift from God."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether ...they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have ...been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A genuinely free and educated man should be able to tune himself, as one tunes a musical instrument, absolutely arbitrarily, at hi...s convenience at any time and to any degree, philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, in ancient or modern form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »