tears and laughter

[Great humour] is no longer dependent upon the mere trick and quibble of words, or the odd and meaningless incongruities in things that strike us as “funny”. Its basis lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful anxieties of to-day that fade into nothingness to-morrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as we look back upon the course that has been traversed we pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old age may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry quarrels of their childhood. And here, in its larger aspect, humour is blended with pathos till the two are one, and represent, as they have in every age, the mingled heritage of tears and laughter that is our lot on earth.

—Stephen Leacock, Humour as I See It (Eris pamphlet, no date; first published in 1916 in Maclean’s)

negation

To put it simply, by the time of Weldon Kees’s arrival, the dominant note in poetry on both sides of the Atlantic was that of negation of the modern reality. The source of this note was, of course, European Romanticism; its current mouthpiece, Modernism. To be sure, the reality by and large did not deserve any better. On the whole, art’s treatment of contemporary reality is almost invariably punitive—so much so that art itself, especially the incurably semantic art of poetry, can be suspected of having a strong Calvinist streak.

—Joseph Brodsky, “Weldon Kees,” (APR, July/Aug. 2010; reprinted from The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1993)

simplicity

Simplicity is not a given. It is an achievement, a human invention, a discovery, a beloved belief.

—William H. Gass, Finding A Form