Conjectures At Random: thoughts

Showing posts with label thoughts. Show all posts

alienated majesty

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," Essays: First Series (1841)

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

fine excess

In Poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity — it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance — Its touches of Beauty should never be halfway thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural to him — shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the luxury of twilight — but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it — and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

—John Keats, letter to John Taylor (February 27, 1818)

one more cosmos

Thought, which science has expelled from its place at the top of the spiral of evolution, reappears at the bottom of it: the physical structure of atoms and their particles is a mathematical structure, a relation. What is equally extraordinary is that this structure can be reduced to a system of signs—and is therefore a language. The power of speech is a particular manifestation of natural communication; human language is one more dialect in the linguistic system of the universe. We might add: the cosmos is a language of languages.

—Octavio Paz, "The Verbal Pact and Correspondence" Alternating Current (Arcade Publishing, 1991)

musical thought

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

— Thomas Carlyle, “Heroes and Hero Worship”