...though the material of poetry is verbal, its import is not the literal assertion made in the words, but the way the assertion is made, and this involves the sound, the tempo, the aura of associations of the words, the long or short sequences of ideas, the wealth or poverty of transient imagery that contains them, the sudden arrest of fantasy by pure fact, or of familiar fact by sudden fantasy, the suspense of literal meaning by a sustained ambiguity resolved in a long-awaited key-word, and the unifying, all-embracing artifice of rhythm.
—Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942)
Showing posts with label fact. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fact. Show all posts
negative capability
...several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…
—John Keats, in a letter to his brothers, Dec. 21, 1817
—John Keats, in a letter to his brothers, Dec. 21, 1817
integrity
...the poet makes no specific statements of fact, and hence is not judged by the truth or falsehood of what he says. The poet...is judged by the integrity or consistency of his verbal structure. The reason is that he imitates the universal, not the particular; he is concerned not with what happened but with what happens.
—Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (Harcourt, 1963)
—Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (Harcourt, 1963)
sympathetic magic
My present purpose is to attack estrangement…
It started, for me, from a sensing of something I found myself obeying for some time before, in Call Me Ishmael, it got itself put down as space, a factor of experience I took as of such depth, width, and intensity that, unwittingly, I insisted upon it as fact…by telling three sorts of stories…which I dubbed FIRST FACTS…
I knew no more then than what I did, than to put down space and fact and hope, by the act of sympathetic magic that words are apt to seem when one first uses them, that I would invoke for others those sensations of life I was small witness to, part doer of. But the act of writing the book added a third noun, equally abstract: stance. For after it was done, and other work in verse followed, I discovered that the fact of this space located a man differently in respect to any act, so much so and with such vexation that only in verse did I acquire any assurance that the stance was not in some way idiosyncratic and only a sign of the limits of my talent, only wretched evidence of my lack of engagement at the heart of life.
—Charles Olson, Black Mountain College (1953). Olson’s Journals, 10: 95-96.
Collected Prose of Charles Olson (U. of California Press, 1997), edited by Donald Allen and Ben Friedlander.
It started, for me, from a sensing of something I found myself obeying for some time before, in Call Me Ishmael, it got itself put down as space, a factor of experience I took as of such depth, width, and intensity that, unwittingly, I insisted upon it as fact…by telling three sorts of stories…which I dubbed FIRST FACTS…
I knew no more then than what I did, than to put down space and fact and hope, by the act of sympathetic magic that words are apt to seem when one first uses them, that I would invoke for others those sensations of life I was small witness to, part doer of. But the act of writing the book added a third noun, equally abstract: stance. For after it was done, and other work in verse followed, I discovered that the fact of this space located a man differently in respect to any act, so much so and with such vexation that only in verse did I acquire any assurance that the stance was not in some way idiosyncratic and only a sign of the limits of my talent, only wretched evidence of my lack of engagement at the heart of life.
—Charles Olson, Black Mountain College (1953). Olson’s Journals, 10: 95-96.
Collected Prose of Charles Olson (U. of California Press, 1997), edited by Donald Allen and Ben Friedlander.
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