living use

Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art.

—Audre Lorde, “My Words Will Be There,” I am your sister: collected and unpublished writings of Audre Lorde (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009)

two cheeses

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

—G. K. Chesterton


A poet's hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.

—W.H. Auden, "Shorts II"

separate words

Marianne’s [Moore] words remain separate.

—William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

modest and secret complexity

The fate of a writer is strange. He begins his career by being a baroque writer, pompously baroque, and after many years, he might attain if the stars are favorable, not simplicity, which is nothing, but rather a modest and secret complexity.

—Jorge Luis Borges, prologue to "The Self and The Other" (1964).

seeks its music

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of the poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation—that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape—should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees. [45]

—Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione” (first published in Fortnightly Review, 1877), Essays on Literature and Art (J.M Dent & Sons, 1973)

language really used

   The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.

—William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1800)