
Letter 162, to Malcolm Darling, 1 December 1916
Selected Letters (1983-1985)
Well, taste for some reason or the other can't carry one far into the world of beauty—that reason being perhaps that though you don't want comradership there you do want the possibility of comradership, and A cannot swallow B's mouthful by any possibility:....and this exclusiveness (to maunder on) also attaches to the physical side of sex though not the least to the spiritual.
Letter 162, to Malcolm Darling, 1 December 1916
Selected Letters (1983-1985)
Letter 162, to Malcolm Darling, 1 December 1916
Selected Letters (1983-1985)
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
I. 31 as quoted by Edwin Arthur Burtt in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science
Joannis Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia, ed. Christian Frisch (1858)
Context: Just as the eye was made to see colours, and the ear to hear sounds, so the human mind was made to understand, not whatever you please, but quantity.
"Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), note 54, p. 291
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Context: The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.
Visions
Context: At that time I also had, for a short while, the strength to bear it. But all too soon I lost external sight of the shape of that beautiful man, and I saw him disappear to nothing, so quickly melting away and fusing together that I could not see or observe him outside of me, nor discern him within me. It was to me at that moment as if we were one without distinction. All of this was external, in sight, in taste, in touch, just as people may taste and see and touch receiving the external sacrament, just as a beloved may receive her lover in the full pleasure of seeing and hearing, with the one becoming one with the other. After this I remained in a state of oneness with my Beloved so that I melted into him and ceased to be myself. And I was transformed and absorbed in the spirit, and I had a vision about the following hours.
“Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.”
"The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 16
Poetry and the Age (1953)
“We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes…”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray