the rest is literature

Let music be, more of it and always!
Let your verse be the thing in motion
Which one feels who flees from an altering soul,
Towards other skies to other loves.

Let your verse be the happy occurrence,
Somehow within the restless morning wind,
Which goes about smelling of mint and thyme...
And all the rest is literature.

—Paul Verlaine, "Art Poétique," translation by Eli Siegel

tissue of quotations

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author/God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.

—Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1968), Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), trans. S. Heath.

imagination and madness

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.

—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

grasp the words

“Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.

—Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose

right noun

Almost any noun is better alone than chaperoned if it’s the right noun, and very few can stand two adjectives. ‘Unsettled dream’ is stronger than ‘unsettled white dream’.

—Ezra Pound, in letter to Parker Tyler, May 1935.

no key

     Someone said to me about Pasternak’s poems: ‘Splendid poems when you explain them all like that, but they need a key supplied with them.’
     No, not supply a key to the poems (dreams), but the poems themselves are a key to understanding everything. But from understanding to accepting there isn’t just a step, there is no step at all; to understand is to accept, there is no other understanding, any other understanding is non-understanding. Not in vain does the French comprendre mean both ‘understand’ and ‘encompass’—that is, ‘accept’ and ‘include’.

—Marina Tsvetaeva, from title essay of Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), introduced and translated by Angela Livingstone, p. 173.