“[Robert Lowell] is a poet of both Will and Imagination, but his Will is always seizing his Imagination by the shoulders and saying to it in a grating voice: “Don’t sit there fooling around; get to work!” — and his poor Imagination gets tense all over and begins to revolve determinedly and familiarly, like a squirrel in a squirrel-cage. Goethe talked about the half-somnambulistic state of the poet; but Mr. Lowell too often is either having a nightmare or else is wide awake gritting his teeth and working away at All The Things He Does Best. Cocteau said to poets: Learn what you can do and then don’t do it; and this is so—we do it enough without trying. As a poet Mr. Lowell sometimes doesn’t have enough trust in God and tries to do everything himself: he proposes and disposes — and this helps to give a certain monotony to his work.”
“Three Books”, p. 236
Poetry and the Age (1953)
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Randall Jarrell215
poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965Related quotes
George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism
Paul Mariani, "Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell" (1994), p. 159
Misattributed
“No poet, in his greatest imaginings, could conceive of anything greater than the real;”
Donald Miller (1971) American writer
Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)
Stendhal book The Charterhouse of Parma
Un être à demi stupide, mais attentif, mais prudent tous les jours, goûte très-souvent le plaisir de triompher des hommes à imagination.
Source: La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839), Ch. 10
Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena
Vol. 2 "On Philosophy and the Intellect" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims
Context: The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves it to the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit. This is why he is able to engage men of the most differing capabilities, indeed fools and sages together. The philosopher, on the other hand, presents not life itself but the finished thoughts which he has abstracted from it and then demands that the reader should think precisely as, and precisely as far as, he himself thinks. That is why his public is so small.
DMX (rapper) (1970) American rapper and actor from New York
Interview with Power 105.1 (23 February 2012), as quoted in TMZ http://www.tmz.com/2012/02/23/dmx-hates-drake-radio-interview/. <br class="br">2010s, 2012
Ram Gopal (1925) Indian author and historian
Kālidāsa: His Art and Culture by Ram Gopal (1984)
