19 February 2007

via Louise Bogan and Donald Hall

William Butler Yeats

I have had to learn how hard is that purification from insincerity, vanity, malignance, arrogance, which is the discovery of style.

artists . . . servants . . . of mere naked life

Only that which does not teach, does not cry out, does not persuade, does not condescend, does not explain, is irresistible.


T. S. Eliot

My early vers libre, of course, was started under the endeavor to practice the same form as Laforgue. This meant merely rhyming lines of irregular length, with the rhymes coming in irregular places.

obscurity comes when the poet is still at the stage of learning how to use language. You have to say the thing the difficult way. The only alternative is not saying it at all.


Marianne Moore

the most difficult thing for me is to be satisfactorily lucid, yet have enough implication in it to suit myself

I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure


Ezra Pound

a continuous curiosity . . . a persistent energy

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