“Old poetics played a large part in my alchemy of the word.”
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet
La vieillerie poétique avait une bonne part dans mon alchimie du verbe. <br class="br"> Une Saison en Enfer http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Season.html (A Season in Hell) (1873)
“Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”
Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being
pg 209
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight
Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician
Queen of the Slipstream
Song lyrics, Poetic Champions Compose (1987)
Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer
"On Ambiguity" in Rational Meaning and Supplementary Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).
“An Heav'n within, — in other Words, Above.”
John Byrom (1692–1763) Poet, inventor of a shorthand system
St. 7 & 8
Miscellaneous Poems (1773), Divine Love, The Essential Characteristic of True Religion
Context: Religion, then, is Love's Celestial Force
That penetrates thro' all to Its True Source;
Loves all along, but with proportion'd Bent,
As Creatures further the Divine Ascent,
Not to the Skies or Stars, but to the part
That will be always uppermost, — the Heart, There is the Seat, as Holy Writings tell,
Where the Most High Himself delights to dwell;
Whither attracting the desirous Will
To its true Rest, He saves it from all Ill,
Gives it to find in His Abyssal Love
An Heav'n within, — in other Words, Above.
Xu Yuanchong (1921) Translator of Chinese poetry
Source: 300 Tang Poems: A New Translation (1987), p. xxii
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet
On his unfinished work Hérodiade, in a letter to Henri Cazalis (30 October 1864); Oeuvres Complètes (1945) edited by Mondor & Jean-Aubry, p. 307, as translated in Mallarmé : The Poet and his Circle ([1999] 2005) by Rosemary Lloyd, p. 48.
Observations
Context: I have finally begun my Herodiade. With terror, for I am inventing a language that must necessarily burst forth from a very new poetics, that could be defined in a couple of words: Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces. … the line of poetry in such a case should be composed not of words, but of intentions, and all the words should fade away before the sensation..
