Great Throughts Treasury

"Miss Rasmussen made a welded sculpture. Her statues were?as she would say, smiling?untouched by human hands; and they looked it. You could tell one from another, if you wanted to, but it was hard to want to. You felt, yawning: It?s ugly, but is it Art? Miss Rasmussen also designed furniture, but people persisted in sitting down in her sculpture, and in asking ?What is that named?? of her chairs. This showed how advanced her work was, and pleased her; yet when she laughed to show her pleasure, her laugh sounded thin and strained."

"Marx said that he had stood Hegel on his head; often Mr. [Horace] Gregory has simply stood Pollyanna on her head."

"Modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can't get it, let him eat Browning."

"Modern poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are?who could endure a century of transition?"

"Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By."

"Most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute?though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War."

"Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion."

"More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone."

"Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few."

"Mrs. Robbins asked: ?If I am not for myself, who then is for me???and she was for herself so passionately that the other people in the world decided that they were not going to let Pamela Robbins beat them at her own game, and stopped playing."

"My friend's cold made-up face, granite among its flowers, her undressed, operated-on, dressed body were my face and body."

"New Directions is a reviewer?s nightmare; it?s enough punishment to read it all, without writing about it too."

"Once man was tossed about helplessly and incessantly by the wind that blew through him?now the toughest of all plants is more sensitive, more easily moved than he. In other words, death is better than life, nothing is better than anything. Nor is this a silly adolescent pessimism peculiar to Housman, as so many critics assure you. It is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born?said a poet approvingly advertised as seeing life steadily and seeing it whole; and if I began an anthology of such quotations there it would take me a long time to finish. The attitude is obviously inadequate and just as obviously important."

"Now that I'm old, my wish is womanish: that the boy putting groceries in my car see me."

"Nowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can have his next three years taken care of by a Guggenheim fellowship, a Kenyon Reviewfellowship, and the Prix de Rome, it is hard to remember what chances the poet took in that small-town world, how precariously hand-to-mouth his existence was. And yet in one way the old days were better; [Vachel] Lindsay after a while, by luck and skill, got far more readers than any poet could get today."

"Once, along with The Transfigured Night, he played a class Rachmaninoff?s Isle of the Dead. Most of the class had not seen the painting, so he went to the library and returned with a reproduction of it. Then he pointed, with a sober smile, to a painting which hung on the wall of the classroom (A Representation of Several Areas, Some of Them Grey, one might have called it; yet this would have been unjust to it?it was non-representational) and played for the class, on the piano, a composition which he said was an interpretation of the painting: he played very slowly and very calmly, with his elbows, so that it sounded like blocks falling downstairs, but in slow motion. But half his class took this as seriously as they took everything else, and asked him for weeks afterward about prepared pianos, tone-clusters, and the compositions of John Cage and Henry Cowell; one girl finally brought him a lovely silk-screen reproduction of a painting by Jackson Pollock, and was just opening her mouth to ? He interrupted, bewilderingly, by asking the Lord what land He had brought him into. The girl stared at him open-mouthed, and he at once said apologetically that he was only quoting Mahler, who had also diedt from America; then he gave her such a winning smile that she said to her roommate that night, forgivingly: ?He really is a nice old guy. You never would know he?s famous.? ?Is he really famous?? her roommate asked. ?I never heard of him before I got here.?"

"One is forced to remember how far from "self-expression" great poems are ? what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent."

"One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book at all. I picture to myself that reader ? that non-reader, rather; one man out of every two ? and I reflect, with shame: "Our poems are too hard for him." But so, too, are Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, pornographic novels ? any book whatsoever."

"One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child. The child has not yet had the chance to know what it is like to be a grownup; he believes, even, that being a grownup is a mistake he will never make?when he grows up he will keep on being a child, a big child with power. So the child and grownup live in mutual love, misunderstanding, and distaste. Children shout and play and cry and want candy; grownups say Ssh! and work and scold and want steak. There is no disputing tastes as contradictory as these. It is not just Mowgli who was raised by a couple of wolves; any child is raised by a couple of grownups. Father and Mother may be nearer and dearer than anyone will ever be again?still, they are members of a different species. God is, I suppose, what our parents were; certainly the ogre of the stories is so huge, so powerful, and so stupid because that is the way a grownup looks to a child. Grownups forget or cannot believe that they seem even more unreasonable to children than children seem to them."

"One straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in that jungle through which one wanders, with its misshapen and extravagant and cannibalistic growths, bent double with fruit and tentacles, disquieting with their rank eccentric life, one comes surprisingly on something so palely healthy: a decorous plant, without thorns or flowers, rootless in the thin sand of the drawing room."

"One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that ?the way it really was? half the time is, and half the time isn?t, the way it ought to be in the novel."

"One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers : if there were some poet?Frost, Stevens, Eliot?whom people still read in canoes!"

"One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world."

"One year they sent a million here: here men were drunk like water, burnt like wood. The fat of good and evil, the breast's star of hope were rendered into soap."

"One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers [Edna St. Vincent Millay?s]: if there were some poet?Frost, Stevens, Eliot?whom people still read in canoes!"

"Our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong."

"Originality is everyone?s aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising na‹vet‚: ?It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel?s discoveries.?"

"Oscar Williams?s new book is pleasanter and a little quieter than his old, which gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter."

"People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it."

"Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not?or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations."

"Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano."

"Our society, it turns out, can use modern art. A restaurant, today, will order a mural by M¡ro in as easy and matter-of-fact a spirit as, twenty-five years ago, it would have ordered one by Maxfield Parrish. The president of a paint factory goes home, sits down by his fireplace?it looks like a chromium aquarium set into the wall by a wall-safe company that has branched out into interior decorating, but there is a log burning in it, he calls it a fireplace, let?s call it a fireplace too?the president sits down, folds his hands on his stomach, and stares at two paintings by Jackson Pollock that he has hung on the wall opposite him. He feels at home with them; in fact, as he looks at them he not only feels at home, he feels as if he were back at the paint factory. And his children?if he has any?his children cry for Calder. He uses thoroughly advanced, wholly non-representational artists to design murals, posters, institutional advertisements: if we have the patience (or are given the opportunity) to wait until the West has declined a little longer, we shall all see the advertisements of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith illustrated by Jean Dubuffet. This president?s minor executives may not be willing to hang a Kandinsky in the house, but they will wear one, if you make it into a sport shirt or a pair of swimming-trunks; and if you make it into a sofa, they will lie on it. They and their wives and children will sit on a porcupine, if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won?t buy and sit in if you tell him it is a chair: the great new art form of our age, the one that will take anything we put in it, is the chair. If Hieronymus Bosch, if Christian Morgenstern, if the Marquis de Sade were living at this hour, what chairs they would be designing!"

"President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins."

"People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm: all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others."

"Progress, in poetry at least, comes not so much from digesting the last age as from rejecting it altogether (or, rather, from eating a little and leaving a lot), and... the world?s dialectic is a sort of neo-Hegelian one in which one progresses not by resolving contradictions but by ignoring them."

"Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so."

"Robert Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even??at least not systematic?; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest."

"Read at whim! read at whim!"

"She said to Constance, parodying a line of poetry that attracted her, In the United States, there one feels free. But she spoiled it by continuing, Except from the Americans?but every pearl has its oyster."

"She helped the hunter with the cooking as a husband helps his wife: when he had gone out to hunt and left something to stew, she would take the pot off the fire. But she never knew when to take it off; sometimes it was cooked to pieces, and she never got it right except by accident. But when the accident happened the hunter would laugh and say, You're as good a cook as my mother! After all, why should he want her to keep house? If you have a seal that could talk, would you want it to sweep the floor?"

"Robert Lowell is a poet of both Will and Imagination, but his Will is always seizing his Imagination by the shoulders and saying to it in a grating voice: ?Don?t sit there fooling around; get to work!? ? and his poor Imagination gets tense all over and begins to revolve determinedly and familiarly, like a squirrel in a squirrel-cage. Goethe talked about the half-somnambulistic state of the poet; but Mr. Lowell too often is either having a nightmare or else is wide awake gritting his teeth and working away at All The Things He Does Best. Cocteau said to poets: Learn what you can do and then don?t do it; and this is so?we do it enough without trying. As a poet Mr. Lowell sometimes doesn?t have enough trust in God and tries to do everything himself: he proposes and disposes ? and this helps to give a certain monotony to his work."

"Sam is a repetitive, comic process that merely marks time: he gets nowhere, but then he doesn?t want to get anywhere. Although there is no possibility of any real change in Sam, he never stops changing: Sam stays there inside Sam, getting less and less like the rest of mankind and more and more like Sam, Sam squared, Sam cubed, Sam to the nth."

"Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels."

"Since Pharaoh?s bits were pushed into the jaws of kings, these dyings?patient or impatient, but dyings?have happened, by the hundreds of millions; they were all wasted. They taught us to kill others and to die ourselves, but never how to live. Who is ?taught to live? by cruelty, suffering, stupidity, and that occupational disease of soldiers, death?"

"She would have come from Paradise and complained to God that the apple wasn?t a winesap at all, but a great big pulpy Washington Delicious; and after the Ark she would have said that there had not been the animals, the spring rains, and the nice long ocean-voyage the prospectus from the travel agency had led her to expect?and that she had been most disappointed at not finding on Mount Ararat Prometheus."

"Since most people know about the modern poet only that he is obscure?i.e., that he is difficult, i.e., that he is neglected ? they naturally make a causal connection between the two meanings of the word, and decide that he is unread because he is difficult. Some of the time this is true: the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry."

"She said to Constance, parodying a line of poetry that attracted her, "In the United States, there one feels free." But she spoiled it by continuing, "Except from the Americans?but every pearl has its oyster.""

"Some of Mr. Gregory?s poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and casual smartness, the flat fashionable irony, meaningless because it proceeds from a frame of reference whose amorphous superiority is the most definite thing about it?they are the trademark not simply of a magazine but of a class."

"Stevens does not think of inspiration (or whatever you want to call it) as a condition of composition. He too is waiting for the spark from heaven to fall?poets have no choice about this?but he waits writing; and this?other things being equal, when it?s possible, if it?s possible?is the best way for a poet to wait."

"Somewhere there must be something that's different from everything. All that I've never thought of ? think of me!"