
Preface: The Theater and Culture
The Theatre and Its Double (1938, translated 1958)
Baler Twine
Preface: The Theater and Culture
The Theatre and Its Double (1938, translated 1958)
From A Note on Poetry (circa 1936) quoted in Modern American Poetry (1950) by Louis Untermeyer
General sources
United States of Banana (2011)
Speech in Doha; quoted on official website http://www.mozabintnasser.qa/en/Pages/ArticlePreview.aspx?ArticleGuid=ed017dde-d770-42a3-80e7-441a15d0a89f&Type=Speech (May 31 2012)
Elements of Refusal (1988)
The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton (1959)
Context: There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. The former is supple and lifelike, it follows our experience. The latter is abstract and rigid, more ideal. The latter is perfectly necessary, perfectly reliable: the former is only sometimes reliable and hardly ever systematic. But the logic of mathematics achieves necessity at the expense of living truth, it is less real than the other, although more certain. It achieves certainty by a flight from the concrete into abstraction. Doubtless, to an idealist, this would seem to be a more perfect reality. I am not an idealist. The logic of the poet — that is, the logic of language or the experience itself — develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.