There are no other questions than these, Half squashed in mud, emerging out of the moment... We all live, learning to like it. No sonnet On this furthest strip of land....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go t...o bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ye gentle souls, who dream of rural ease, Whom the smooth stream and smoother sonnet please;... Go! if the peaceful cot your praises share, Go, look within, and ask if peace be there: If peace be his--that drooping weary sire, Of theirs, that offspring round their feeble fire, Or hers, that matron pale, whose trembling hand Turns on the wretched hearth th' expiring brand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing--to do just t...hat; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or th...e Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Baudelaire compared the great names in art to lighthouses posted along the track of historic time. The simile, as he used it, seiz...es the imagination and represents a great truth, but it allows of an interpretation which the limits of a sonnet form forbade him to develop. He takes the lights of his beacons as much for granted as the sailor does the lights of real lighthouses. But the lighthouses of art do not burn with so fixed and unvarying a lustre. The light they give is always changing insensibly with each generation, now brighter, now dimmer, and often enough growing bright once more. But we sometimes forget that the lights have to be tended or they grow faint and may expire altogether. For them to burn brightly, they must be fed by the devotion of some few spirits in each generation. If that fails for a long period they go out and become one of those dead, ineffectual names which still linger on, obstructions rather than aids to the historical voyager.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under... a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet--the scientific poet--of a new mythology.... Each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant.... They compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection. And because they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered and from morning till night a million school-teachers and broadcasters proclaim the infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »