“It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.”

— William Carlos Williams

Introduction
The Wedge (1944)
Context: When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them — without distortion which would mar their exact significances — into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

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William Carlos Williams 83

American poet 1883–1963

Judith McNaught (1944) American writer

Source: Paradise

“It's mad isn’t it. I guess I just wanted to make something that people would cherish and hope to hold on to for a while. The goal is to make each book a unique work of art, with an intrinsic quality all their own.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

Regarding choosing to bookbind each of his books by hand rather than choosing to have them mass produced; as quoted in "The Caffiene Induced World of Brian A Kenny" https://thecaffieneinducedworldofbrianakenny.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/the-raven-speaks-insight-with-lorin-morgan-richards/ The Raven Speaks: Insight with Lorin Morgan-Richards by Brian A. Kenny (6 December 2012).

“How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art & Other Serious Matters, (1985), p. 55, "Evidences of Surreality"

“The art system operates on its own terms, but an observer of art can choose many different distinctions to indicate what he observes.”

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) German sociologist, administration expert, and social systems theorist

Source: Art As a Social System (2000), p. 102.

“He produced a work of art which by its deep appreciation of natural beauty and the melancholy tenderness of its treatment of the ancient legend did more than any single work to bring about the romantic movement in European, and especially in German, literature.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

The Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910-11) vol. 17, p. 268.
Criticism

“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.”

Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) 1922-2008 French agricultural engineer, filmmaker and writer

“What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“Faith has its price. When misfortune strikes the true believer, he assumes he has done something to deserve punishment, but isn’t quite certain what. The realist, recognizing that he lives in a Darwinian universe, is simply grateful to have made it to another sunset.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Deepsix (2001), Chapter 10 (p. 165)

“The excellence of every Art is its intensity.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Source: Complete Poems and Selected Letters

“Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

“It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.”

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William Carlos Williams 83

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