“I believe Mull had much to do with my poetry: its physical beauty, so different from Skye’s, with the terrible imprint of the clearances on it, made it almost intolerable for a Gael.”
Sorley MacLean, The Sorley MacLean Trust http://www.sorleymaclean.org/english/from_skye.htm
Letters and interviews
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Sorley MacLean 6
Scottish poet 1911–1996Related quotes
“I do physics in order to earn my living, and I do poetry in order to keep alive.”
Interview with The New York Times https://nyti.ms/2Uzw2nh, June 27, 1968, p. 49
“Perfection and imperfection are names which do not differ much from the names beauty and ugliness.”
Letter to Hugo Boxel (Oct. 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).
Context: Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near; thus things regarded in themselves, and in relation to God, are neither ugly nor beautiful. Therefore, he who says that God has created the world, so that it might be beautiful, is bound to adopt one of the two alternatives, either that God created the world for the sake of men's pleasure and eyesight, or else that He created men's pleasure and eyesight for the sake of the world. Now, whether we adopt the former or the latter of these views, how God could have furthered His object by the creation of ghosts, I cannot see. Perfection and imperfection are names which do not differ much from the names beauty and ugliness.<!--p. 382
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 1, Chapter 17, “Bonfire Night” (p. 540).
“It is intolerable that it should be in the power of one blockhead to do so much mischief.”
Fox on George III in a letter to Mr. Fitzpatrick (9 September 1781), quoted in John Brooke, George III (Panther, 1974), pp. 363-364.
1780s
“I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will be mingled with beliefs.”
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVII
Context: Who shall compose the Bible of human desire, the terrible and simple Bible of that which drives us from life to life, the Bible of our doings, our goings, our original fall? Who will dare to tell everything, who will have the genius to see everything?
I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will be mingled with beliefs. The more incapable of it I feel myself, the more I believe it to be possible. The sad splendour with which certain memories of mine overwhelm me, shows me that it is possible. Sometimes I myself have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece. Sometimes my visions have been mingled with a thrill of evidence so strong and so creative that the whole room has quivered with it like a forest, and there have been moments, in truth, when the silence cried out.
But I have stolen all this, and I have profited by it, thanks to the shamelessness of the truth revealed. At the point in space in which, by accident, I found myself, I had only to open my eyes and to stretch out my mendicant hands to accomplish more than a dream, to accomplish almost a work.