Thought provoking

Humanity is immense and reality has a myriad forms; the most one can affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction have the odour of it, and others have not

It is, in large part, our familiarity with the photographers and videographers that places their output in a different category than the 20th-century war images on which our inherited discourse is based. Even if skillful, these are not works of art; they are distress signals. There is no hand-wringing about the politics of representation. The victi... See more

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Those casual fans wonder why he can’t be more like the Stones, unfailing jukeboxes of their earlier selves. They want to squint and see the young Dylan, with his Pre-Raphaelite hair and his Brando sneer. They want, at least for an hour and a half, a magic act: a man in his eighties who is a man in his youth.

“I hate that kind a sound,” said I

“The only beauty’s ugly, man

The crackin’, shakin’, breakin’ sounds’re

The only beauty I understand.”

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

I mean I think I am about to embody, at last, the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning.