to see a soul

“Quem não vê bem uma palavra, não pode ver bem uma alma."

"One who cannot see a word well, cannot see a soul well."

—Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935)

dark passage

[Poetry’s] alleged obscurity is due not to its own nature, which is to enlighten, but to the darkness which it explores, and must explore: the dark of the soul herself and the dark of the mystery which envelops human existence.

—St-John Perse, essay entitled "On Poetry," translation by W.H. Auden, St. John Perse: Collected Poems (Princeton U. Press, 1971)

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

body and soul

What the soul does for the body so does the poet for her people.

—Gabriela Mistral, inscription on her tomb. From Marjorie Agosin’s introduction to Gabriela Mistral: A Reader (White Pine Press, 1993), translated by Maria Giachetti.

form ever follows function

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.

—Louis Sullivan, "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," Lippincott's Magazine (March 1896)

hidden place

Poetry’s freedom resembles, thus, as Plato pointed out, the freedom of a child, and the freedom of play, and the freedom of dreams. It is none of these. It is the freedom of the creative spirit.

And because poetry is born in this root life where the powers of the soul are active in common, poetry implies an essential requirement of totality or integrity. Poetry is the fruit neither of the intellect alone, nor of the imagination alone. Nay more, it proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. And the first obligation imposed on the poet is to consent to be brought back to the hidden place, near the center of the soul, where the totality exists in the state of a creative source.

—Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition In Art & Poetry (Pantheon Books, 1953)

poet's charge

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body....

—Walt Whitman, from the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass