Then it doesn't Matter that the deaths come in the wrong order. All has been so easily... Written about. And you find the right order after all: play, the streets, shopping, time flying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Homer sweeps us away by the irresistible movement of lines through a whole passage to a splendid climax. What counts is the single...ness of his effect, the unbroken maintenance of a heroic or tragic mood, the concentration on some action vividly imagined and clearly portrayed without irrelevance or second thoughts or even those hints that lure into bypaths of fancy and suggest that there is more in the words than is obvious at first sight. But in Virgil, great though the paragraphs are, compelling though the climax is when it is reached, we are more concerned with the details, with each small effect and each deftly placed word, than with the whole. We linger over the richness of single phrases, over the "pathetic half-lines," over the precision or potency with which a word illuminates a sentence or a happy sequence of sounds imparts an inexplicable charm to something that might otherwise have been trivial. Of course, Homer has his magical phrases and Virgil his bold effects, but the distinction stands. It is a matter of composition, of art, and it marks the real difference between the two kinds of epic, which are not so much "authentic" and "literary" as oral and written.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty..., he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This book was written in good faith, reader. It warns you from the outset that in it I have set myself no goal but a domestic and ...private one.... I am myself the matter of my book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an e...ssential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since I know nothing of the merits of poetry, I am not able to pass any opinion upon this, but I can see that "reap" and "deep," "...prayers" and "bears," "ark" and "dark," "true" and "grew" do rhyme, and so I suppose it is a splendid effort, but if you had written it in plain prose, I could have understood it a great deal better and read it a great deal more easily.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is im...mortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... no book ... ever competed with the Bible. The story of Ruth was better than Ramona, and the poetry of Job was better than Long...fellow. I still have my first big Bible, carefully underlined through with red and black ink, and interleafed [sic] with painfully written manuscript pages.... Margery and I earned our five cents a week for church and a penny for Sunday school by learning three verses of the Bible a day and six on Sunday. We learned dozens and dozens of chapters. I supposed "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha" were better poetry, but I didn't like them so well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.... He must not be afraid to return again and... again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand--like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery--in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has sta...mped with its own freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »