poets

Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life. . . . Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet.

The dust comes secretly day after day, Lies on my ledge and dulls my shining things. But O this dust I shall drive away Is flowers and kings, Is Solomon's temple, poets, Nineveh.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.

True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blonde Hero--really look--and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

It has been written: To the cynic the body is no more than a tenement of clay. To the poet, a palace of the soul. To the physician, an all too ailing hulk. The psychiatrist sees it as a housing for the mind and personality. The geneticist sees it as a perpetuation of its own kind. The biologist sees it as an organism which can alter the future as a result of the experience of the past. The anthropologist sees it as an accumulation of culture. Others have viewed the body as essentially just a machine, a concept that sometimes appeals and sometimes appalls. The English satirist Samuel Butler dismissed his fellow men as but "a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stew pan and the whole thing fixed upon stilts." But to the more reverent, the bodily mechanism is a masterpiece of precise planning-a delicate and complex apparatus whose various components work as a unit to achieve such diverse feats as scaling a mountain top, building a bridge or composing a symphony.

"You cannot believe what you are saying." "Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry."

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.