
“Whenever a work's structure is intentionally one of its own themes, another of its themes is art.”
Quoted by Ted Nelson in Literary Machines (1982)
Remains of the Rev. Carlos Wilcox: with a memoir of his life (1828), p. 99 https://archive.org/details/remainsofrevcarl00wilc/page/100/mode/2up
Poetry
“Whenever a work's structure is intentionally one of its own themes, another of its themes is art.”
Quoted by Ted Nelson in Literary Machines (1982)
The Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation (1950)
“Its always good to have a theme.”
Source: Working Class Zero (2003), Chapter 2, p. 14
Canto II, I
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)
Source: " The Poet of Pessimism https://www.henrysalt.co.uk/library/essay/the-poet-of-pessimism/", Vegetarian Review, August 1896
Context: We work for an ideal, not because we believe the ideal is destined to be triumphant, but because we are impelled so to work, and cannot, without violence to our best instincts, act otherwise. We protest against cruelty and injustice for the same reason, not merely because we feel that the dawn of a better day is at hand, but because such a protest has to be made, and we know intuitively that we must help to make it. Of the event we can have no absolute assurance—it rests for other minds and other hands than our—but we can at least be assured that we have done what was natural and inevitable to us, and that, whether successful or unsuccessful, there was no other course for a thoughtful man to take.
Kandinsky's last theoretical statement (Paris, 1942); in Kandinsky, Frank Whitford, Paul Hamlyn Ltd, London 1967, p. 38
1930 - 1944
Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.201-2