village explainer

He [Ezra Pound] was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

—Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Harcourt Brace, NY, 1933. p. 246)

bric-a-brac

"The trouble with you, Robert, is that you're too academic," said Stevens. "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you're too executive," retorted Frost. "The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about subjects." "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac."

—Lawrence Roger Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938 (Holt Rinehart Winston, 1970), p. 61, recounting an exchange between Stevens & Frost in Key West in 1940.

make stone love stone

It seemed to me that Robinson Jeffers was building that house for years and years. Sometimes I'd see rocks piled out there and it looked like he couldn't make up his mind which one to use and they'd be there for a long period of time and then finally they would find a place in these walls that were going up.

—Thomas Gordon Greene, recounting Robinson Jeffers building by hand the 'Tor House', in Carmel CA. (Quoted in "Don't Pave Main Street-Carmel's Heritage," a 113 minute color film, copyright 1994 by Carmel Heritage).

broken dream

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimage': 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to the room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but alas! without the after restoration of the latter:

........................Then all the charm
Is broken -- all that phantom-world so fair,
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other. Stay awhile,
Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes--
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo! he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror.

Yet from the still surviving recollections of his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. [I shall sing a sweeter song today]: but the to-morrow is yet to come.

As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.—1816.

[Author's note appended to "Kubla Khan Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment (1798)" by S.T. Coleridge]

fifteen thousand

In 1956, Eliot lectured on “The Function of Criticism” in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people. “I do not believe,” he remarked afterward, “there are fifteen thousand people in the entire world who are interested in criticism.”

—Joseph Epstein, "T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture"
commentarymagazine.com (November 2010)

learn it and die

Solon of Athens (c.640-560 BCE), the great lawmaker and reformer, attended a banquet where he heard a young man sing a poem by Sappho. Upon hearing the song Solon asked the boy to teach it to him. When others at the table asked Solon why he was so keen on knowing that song, he replied: "I want to learn it and die.

[Anecdote told in various classical sources.]

live and/or die

Famous controversial revision: W.H. Auden changed the last line of his poem "September 1, 1939," from "We must love one another or die" to "We must love one another and die."

elephants teaching

When Vladimir Nabokov was nominated for a chair in literature at Harvard, the linguist Roman Jakobson protested: “What’s next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?”

Anecdote quoted in D. G. Myers's The Elephants Teach.