Great Throughts Treasury

"Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself ? and, sometimes, doing so ? is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art."

"Such cultural homosexuality is an alienation more or less forced upon certain groups of Auden?s society by the form of their education and the nature of their social and financial conditions. Where the members of a class and a sex are taught, in a prolonged narcissistic isolation, to hero-worship themselves?class and sex; where?to a different class?unemployment is normal, where one?s pay is inadequate or impossible for more than one; where children are expensive liabilities instead of assets; where women are business competitors; where most social relationships have become as abstract, individualistic, and mobile as the relations of the labor market, homosexuality is a welcome asset to the state, one of the cheapest and least dangerous forms of revolution."

"Stevens?s poetry makes one understand how valuable it can be for a poet to write a great deal. Not too much of that great deal, ever, is good poetry; but out of quantity can come practice, naturalness, accustomed mastery, adaptations and elaborations and reversals of old ways, new ways, even?so that the poet can put into the poems, at the end of a lifetime, what the end of a lifetime brings him. Stevens has learned to write at will, for pleasure; his methods of writing, his ways of imagining, have made this possible for him as it is impossible for many living poets?Eliot, for instance. Anything can be looked at, felt about, meditated upon, so Stevens can write about anything; he does not demand of his poems the greatest concentration, intensity, dramatic immediacy, the shattering and inexplicable rightness the poet calls inspiration."

"That most human and American of presidents?of Americans?Abraham Lincoln, said as a young man: ?The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who?ll get me a book I ain?t read.? It?s a hard heart, and a dull one, that doesn?t go out to that sentence. The man who will make us see what we haven?t seen, feel what we haven?t felt, understand what we haven?t understood?he is our best friend. And if he knows more than we do, that is an invitation to us, not an indictment of us. And it is not an indictment of him, either; it takes all sorts of people to make a world?to make, even, a United States of America."

"The Author to the Reader I?ve read that Luther said (it?s come to me so often that I?ve made it into meter): and even if the world should end tomorrow I still would plant my little apple-tree. Here, reader, is my little apple-tree."

"The cat's asleep; I whisper kitten till he stirs a little and begins to purr-- he doesn't wake. Today out on the limb (The limb he thinks he can't climb down from). He mewed until I heard him in the house. I climbed up to get him down: he mewed. What he says and what he sees are limited. My own response is even more constricted. I think, It's lucky; what you have is too. What do you have except--well, me? I joke about it but it's not a joke; the house and I are all he remembers. Next month how will he guess that it is winter and not just entropy, the universe plunging at last into its cold decline? I cannot think of him without a pang. Poor rumpled thing, why don't you see that you have no more, really, than a man? Men aren't happy; why are you?"

"The best of cause ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything?I am being sympathetic, not satiric?for the very best reasons."

"The characteristic poetic strategy of our time?refine your singularities?is something Auden has not learned; so his best poems are very peculiarly good, nearly the most interesting poems of our time. When he writes badly, we can afford to be angry at him, and he can afford to laugh at us."

"The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love?he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn?t help himself. To him it wasn?t a means to a lecture or article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn?t this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means?that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives; but duringthe contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence, Read at whim! read at whim!"

"The greatest American industry?why has no one ever said so??is the industry of using words. We pay tens of millions of people to spend their lives lying to us, or telling us the truth, or supplying us with a nourishing medicinal compound of the two. All of us are living in the middle of a dark wood?a bright Technicolored forest?of words, words, words. It is a forest in which the wind is never still: there isn?t a tree in the forest that is not, for every moment of its life and our lives, persuading or ordering or seducing or overawing us into buying this, believing that, voting for the other."

"The head withdraws into its hatch (a boy's), the engines rise to their blind laboring roar, and the green, made beasts run home to air. Now in each aspect death is pure."

"The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed."

"The firelight of a long, blind, dreaming story lingers upon your lips; and I have seen firm, fixed forever in your closing eyes, the Corn King beckoning to his Spring Queen."

"The motto of his [Robinson Jeffers?s] work is ?More! More!??but as Tolstoy says, ?A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and there is no contagion?; and Frost, bearing him out, says magnificently: ?A very little of anything goes a long way in a work of art.?"

"The moon rises. The red cubs rolling in the ferns by the rotten oak stare over a marsh and a meadow to the farm's white wisp of smoke. A spark burns, high in heaven. Deer thread the blossoming rows of the old orchard, rabbits hop by the well-curb. The cock crows from the tree by the widow's walk; two stars in the trees to the west, are snared, and an owl's soft cry runs like a breath through the forest. Here too, though death is hushed, though joy obscures, like night, their wars, the beings of this world are swept by the Strife that moves the stars."

"The poet needs to be deluded about his poems?for who can be sure that it is delusion? In his strongest hours the public hardly exists for the writer; he does what he ought to do, has to do, and if afterwards some Public wishes to come and crown him with laurel crowns, well, let it! if critics wish to tell people all that he isn?t, well, let them?he knows what he is. But at night when he can?t get to sleep it seems to him that it is what he is, his own particular personal quality, that he is being disliked for. It is this that the future will like him for, if it likes him for anything; but will it like him for anything? The poet?s hope is in posterity, but it is a pale hope; and now that posterity itself has become a pale hope."

"The nurse is the night to wake to, to die in: and the day I live, the world and its life are her dreams."

"The poets of the last generation were extremely erudite, but their erudition was of the rather specialized type that passed as currency of the realm in a somewhat literary realm. About Darwin, Marx, Freud and Co., about all characteristically ?scientific? or ?modern? thinkers most of them concluded regretfully: ?If they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to ignore them.? (Or deplore them.)"

"The really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it."

"The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time."

"The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [e.e.] cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical devices: his misuse of parts of speech, his use of negative prefixes, his word-coining, his systematic relation of words that grammar and syntax don?t permit us to relate?all this makes him a magical bootlegger or moonshiner of language, one who intoxicates us on a clear liquor no government has legalized with its stamp."

"The rusty pump pumps over your sweating face the clear water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands and gulp from them the dailiness of life."

"The soul has no assignments, neither cooks nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time. Here in this enclave there are centuries for you to waste: the short and narrow stream of life meanders into a thousand valleys of all that was, or might have been, or is to be. The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly."

"The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas?the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, ?That was a good stroke.?"

"The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas' grain, pigeons settling on the bears' bread, buzzards tearing the meat the flies have clouded."

"The work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words."

"The world goes by my cage and never sees me."

"The writer does not get from his work as he writes and reads it the same aesthetic shock that the reader does; and since the writer is so accustomed to reading other stories, and having them produce a decided effect upon him, he is disquieted at not being equally affected by his own."

"The usual bad poem in somebody?s Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one?s teeth."

"The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces."

"The ways we miss our lives are life."

"The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks."

"The tags' chain stirs with the wind; and I sleep paid, dead, and a soldier. Who fights for his own life loses, loses: I have killed for my world, and am free."

"There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden?s early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles?and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden?s poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, ?I had rather be right than poetry?; but I am not sure, then, that he is either."

"There is in this world no line so bad that someone won?t someday copy it."

"There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this."

"These calves, grown muscular with certainties; this nose, three medium-sized pink strawberries."

"They have thrown away her electric toothbrush, someone else slips the key into the lock of her safety-deposit box at the Crocker-Anglo Bank; her seat at the cricket matches is warmed by buttocks less delectable than hers."

"They said, Here are the maps; we burned the cities. It was not dying?no, not ever dying; but the night I died I dreamed that I was dead, and the cities said to me: Why are you dying? We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?"

"This poet is now, most of the time, an elder statesman like Baruch or Smuts, full of complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy. But of course there was always a good deal of this in the official r“le that Frost created for himself; one imagines Yeats saying about Frost, as Sarah Bernhardt said about Nijinsky: ?I fear, I greatly fear, that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.? Sometimes it is this public figure, this official r“le ? the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity ? that writes the poems, and not the poet himself; and then one gets a self-made man?s political editorials, full of cracker-box philosophizing, almanac joke-cracking ? of a snake-oil salesman?s mysticism; one gets the public figure?s relishing consciousness of himself, an astonishing constriction of imagination and sympathy; one gets sentimentality and whimsicality; an arch complacency, a complacent archness; and one gets Homely Wisdom till the cows come home."

"This sort of admission of error, of change, makes us trust a critic as nothing else but omniscience could..."

"To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all."

"Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, "That's what it means to have a style"; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, "It is a style that no subject can change.""

"We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn't arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along..."

"We are all?so to speak?intellectuals about something."

"We are willing to admit the normality of the abnormal?are willing to admit that we never understood the normal better than when it has been allowed to reach its full growth and become the abnormal."

"We died like aunts of pets or foreigners."

"We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life ? in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and of that different world to which the work of art alone gives us access ? unwillingly accuses our lives."

"We like somebody who succeeds with such bad conscience, and who seems to wish that he had the nerve to be a failure or, better still, something to which the terms success and failure don?t apply?as when Mallory said, about Everest: ?Success is meaningless here.?"

"We live in an age which eschews sentimentality as if it were a good deal more than the devil. (Actually, of course, a writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, not to matter.)"