fossil poetry

The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolizes the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” (Essays: Second Series, 1844)

can't take out anything

Disce quod ignoras: Marsi doctique Pedonis
saepe duplex unum pagina tractat opus.
Non sunt longa quibus nihil est quod demere possis,
sed tu, Cosconi, disticha longa facis.

Learn what you don't know: one work of (Domitius) Marsus or
    learned Pedo
often stretches out over a doublesided page.
A work isn't long if you can't take anything out of it,
but you, Cosconius, write even a couplet too long.

—Martial

eschews metaphor

Haiku eschews metaphor, simile, and personification. Nothing is like something else in most well-realized haiku. As Basho said: "Learn of the pine from a pine." Learn, that is, what a pine tree is, not what it is like—one supposes this is what Basho meant.

—Kenneth Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku (Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1957)

greater reality

A poetry of longing: not for escape, but for a greater reality.

—Theodore Roethke, Straw For The Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday & Co., 1972), edited by David Wagoner

nothing ugly

There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, without inner or outer truth.

—Auguste Rodin

not permitted to turn away

First, artistic perception had to overcome itself to the point of realizing that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, is, and shares the truth of its being with everything else that exists. Just as the creative artist is not permitted to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through. (Paris, 1907)

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cezanne, translated by Joel Agee

fulcrum of its own body

Shakespeare’s intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont or Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or a passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength.

—S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk (1834)

everything contemporary

If he doesn’t put down the contemporary thing, he isn’t a great writer, for he has to live in the past. That is what I mean by “everything is contemporary.” The minor poets of the period, or the precious poets of the period, are all people who are under the shadow of the past. A man who is making a revolution has to be contemporary. A minor person can live in the imagination.

—Gertrude Stein, How Writing Is Written: Volume II of the Uncollected Writing of Gertrude Stein (Black Sparrow Press, 1974), edited by Robert Bartlett Haas

emotionless sentence

a sentence is not emotional a paragraph is

—Gertrude Stein, How to Write

body forth

We body forth our ideals in personal acts, either alone or with others in society. We body forth felt experience in a poem’s image and sound. We body forth our inner residence in the architecture of our homes and common buildings. We body forth our struggles and our revelations in the space of theatre. That is what form is: the bodying forth. The bodying forth of the living vessel in the shapes of clay.

—M.C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Wesleyan U. Press, 1969)

defamiliarization or ostranenie

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

—Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", 1917, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by L.T. Lemon & M.J. Reis, (U. of Nebraska Press, 1965, p12)