Thoughts on Poetry and Art
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Thoughts on Poetry & Art
Thoughts on Poetry & Art
This is a page where we can gather quotes and passages by famous poets, critics, and ourselves about what poetry & art are, and why they matter. . . .Ideas that have inspired or given meaning to our experiences of poetry & art. Your contributions of such quotes are welcome too! Just email them to us at suggested quotes.
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From Notable Poets & Artists
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
— T. S. Eliot
i beg my bones to be good but
they keep clicking music
— by Lucille Clifton, 1987
. . . A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
— W. H. Auden
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
— Jean Cocteau
. . . you can
not make any hard and fast rule
concerning the morality of crawling into
soup . . ."
— by Archy (the cockroach)
from "clarence the ghost", in Archy and Mehitabel, by Don Marquis. [UNL , LCL]
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
. . .
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
— by T. S. Eliot, in the 'Four Quartets": Burnt Norton
(note, this was largely inspired by Eliot's study of Bachelard's Inuition of the Instant.)
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From Notable Critics
From Notable Critics
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Poetry has often been compared with painting and sculpture. Simonides long ago said that Poetry is a speaking picture, and painting is mute Poetry.
"Poetry," says Cousin, "is the first of the Arts because it best represents the infinite."
And again, "Though the arts are in some respects isolated, yet there is one which seems to profit by the resources of all, and that is Poetry. With words, Poetry can paint and sculpture [sic]; she can build edifices like an architect; she unites, to some extent, melody and music. She is, so to say, the center in which all arts unite."
A true poem is a gallery of pictures.
It must, I think, be admitted that painting and sculpture can give us a clearer and more vivid idea of an object we have never seen than any description can convey. But when we have once seen it, then on the contrary there are many points which the poet brings before us, and which perhaps neither in the representation, nor even in nature, should we perceive for ourselves. Objects can be most vividly brought before us by the artist, actions by the poet; space is the domain of Art, time of Poetry.
-- John Lubbock, in The Pleasures of Life, 1887
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Editorial Note:
Please note that the major part of the following excerpt from Intuition of the Instant is not referring to haiku—or at least not to haiku only; but it can be considered an excellent description of the inherent nature of haiku, i.e. of what makes for the best haiku. I state it like this: a haiku is a three-line poem composed of two related or unrelated images followed by a third image that links them all in a sudden satori (sudden enlightenment, or sudden revelation)-—what Bachelard would call "a poetic instant" in verticle time,
. . .
"Poetry is instant metaphysics. In a short poem, it must deliver, all at once, the vision of a universe and the secret of a soul—an insight into being and objects. If it only follows the time of life, it is less than life. It cannot be more than life. unless it immobilizes life evoking on the spot the dialectic of joy and suffering. It is thus the principle of an essential simultaneity in which the most scattered and disjointed being attained its unity.
. . .
The poetic instant is thus necessarily complex; it moves, it proves—it invites, it console—it is astonishing and familiar. It is essentially harmonic relation between two opposites. Within a poet's passionate instant, there is always a touch of reason; within the reasoned rejection, always a touch of passion. Successive antitheses already fill a poet with pleasure. But for these antitheses to yield an experience of rapture and ecstasy, they must contract into ambivalence. Only then does a poetic instant arise . . . At the very least, a poetic instant is the awareness of an ambivalence. But it is more than that, for it is stimulated ambivalence—an active, dynamic ambivalence. The poetic instant compels us to value or devalue. Being rises or descends in a poetic instant without accepting world time, which would inevitably turn ambivalence back into antitheses, simultaneity into succession.
This affinity between antithesis and ambivalence can be easily verified if we are willing to commune with a poet who keenly experiences the two terms of his antithesis in one and the same instant. The second term is not invoked by the first. Both terms are invoked together. A poem's true poetic instants are hence to be found at all those points where the human heart is able to invert antitheses. More intuitively speaking, a well-knit ambivalence is revealed through its temporal character: instead of masculine, vigorous time which thrusts forth and conquers, instead of the androgynous nous instant, the mystery of poetry is androgynous."
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From The Staff of he Lion
From The Staff of he Lion
The Winged Lion in our courtyard, being a Seraph, it has three sets of wings, even though only one set is depicted on our sculpture. According to St. Bonaventure (1221 - 1274) , these sets of wings represent, consecutively the journey of our soul to God as we make our way through life, encountering the inspiration of: (1) life here on earth, as in birds in flight, people helping people, or any experience of the numinous; (2) the release of the spirit inspired to fly heavenward; and (3) the inspired soul singing God's praises there after, in the fashion of the four seraphim of scripture. This is what is depicted in the sculpture in our courtyard, providing a landmark that will be recognizable for people, as they walk, drive or otherwise make their way here.
This, the flight of the spirit, is appropriate for any art form (& forum), poetry included; but also painting, sculpting, music, dance, fiction, and drama . . . as well as discussion panels. In other cultures and in other times, this was represented by the idea of “the muse” that inspired artists in their art. You do not have to, but we see it as the work, at its best, of the Holy Spirit.
The artistic impulse is at the heart of all the humanities; the poetic impulse is the heart and soul of all the arts and sciences; some say. A graphic artist might see it slightly differently. This impulse not only imitates reality but, in its empathic desire to delineate the truth of reality and to re-create it through imitation, it generates new realities. The poet's task, in every art form & in every science, is to responsibly cultivate this impulse, with integrity.
Art, the soul, and the universe as seen through our eyes and expressed in our arts, are all metaphysical realities. In this respect, we are all privileged to be co-creators of God's universe, for better or worse.
. . .
I want to mention something about the “privilege,” for the poets, artists, and other speakers, of doing this for The Lion. Students—and we ALL are students when it gets down to it—should be learning both the substance of their discipline and the values that make it meaningful to their society and culture.
Concerning the first, “substance,” the creative core of substance is that it is . . . well, creative. We, each and every one of us, creates the universe we inhabit; and share with others the universes they inhabit. All we have to help us decode the nature of the universe is our five senses, and each of these is only in contact with what lies outside ourselves for a few milliseconds at a time. From this brief snippet of exposure we gain all our perception, understanding, and beliefs; and much of that we create in our mind, either by our personal experience or by what others share and teach us about things—all of which is fed to us by our senses. If there is someone out there who possesses no senses at all, I cannot even begin to reasonably imagine what their experiences are, nor what the universe they inhabit might be like. For the rest of us, I can . . . imagine. And artists (poets included!) help us imagine. They hold up to us depictions not of the universe as it is, but as it might be . . . as it could be.
Concerning the second, “value and meaning,” what we can and do imagine is based on our ability to empathize with what we encounter. At the center of empathy is something that all ethical systems are based upon: 'Do to others as you would have them do to you'; the Golden Rule, which applies to human and non-human Nature alike. Most such systems include something about belief in God or in gods, which turns ethical systems into moral & religious ones. Artists of all stripes help us explore the nuances of this . . . these . . . substantive universes.
At the center of all this is the universe you create in your own mind. That does not make the universe in which any given person lives an accurate or even acceptable interpretation for others, but it is creative—it is a created universe. It does mean that we need to encounter other 'universes' so that we can compare and contrast 'ours' with 'theirs,' which gives us more information on which to base our own universe-building (or decoding). This is at least one major value of poetry and the arts. We can incorporate and build on the empathic perceptions of others, complimenting their sensory input and interpretations of that input from these other minds, when we deem it appropriate.
Mark Fairchild (November - December 2024)
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From Intuition of the Instant (in Appendix A) by Gaston Bachelard (1932) (translated from L'inuition de l'instant by Eileen Rizo-Patron):
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