feeling things

Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling.

—Wei T’ai, (A poet of Sung Dynasty cited in A.C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang), quoted by Charles Reznikoff.

elaborate philosophy

I don't mean…that I'm trying to elaborate a philosophy in a poem: I mean that that these thoughts are part of one's feeling about everything—it can't just be kept out, except by the purest artiness.

—George Oppen, Selected Letters, pp. 18-19

way through emotion

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling...A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually--that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too--but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, ch. 1

symbolic

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

—Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953, p. 40).