
“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”
A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)
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.
“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”
A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)
“I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy”
“Poetry is a process, a form of discovery, which if it serves a cause, transcends it.”
Reading Modern Poetry, London, 1989
Erinna
The Golden Violet (1827)
Variant: Which is the best,—
Beauty and glory, in a southern clime,
Mingled with thunder, tempest; or the calm
Of skies that scarcely change, which, at the least,
If much of shine they have not, have no storms?
Source: Quoted in Tracy Metz, "'Form Follows Feminine': Niemeyer, 90, Is Still Going Strong," Architectural Record (December 1997), p. 35.
“Multitudes, of beautiful works,
Believed, served with us.”
Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The Elegy of the Thousand Sons
"Poets of the People" in Art, Literature and the Drama (1858).
Context: There are two modes of criticism. One which … crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drouth. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant.
There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.