Art & Culture

Our future depends on our combining our passions with our best interests.

The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibilities.

The subject matter of art is life, life as it actually is, but the function of art is to make life better.

Art as art, not art for art, must be life-enhancing.

Art is a celebration of life.

Art is man's refuge from adversity.

Art is the communication of ecstasy.

Art is an indecent exposure of the consciousness.

A work of art is a confession.

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the spoken, the living language on their day, or the old forms, embodying explosive concepts, will tyrannize over the imagination, depriving us of its greatest benefits. In the form of the new poems will lie embedded the essences of future enlightenment.

Custom is like a river; it is the common course followed by the majority that, while relatively fixed, is known to shift over time.

On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death and decay, but the sum total of individual achievements, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of the Larger Self.

Someone will remember us. We are oppressed by fears of oblivion yet we are always saved by the judgment of good men.

For only in others can we renew our life and so perpetuate ourselves.

In all things that are purely social we can be as seperate as the five fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

Simplicity is the essence of the great, the true, and the beautiful in art.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

Whenever the creative forces predominated, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events. The work in process becomes the poet's fate and determines his psychic development.

Although she feeds me on bread of bitterness, and sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.

 

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