Literature and Words

A note: despair at the badness of the book; can’t think how I ever could write such stuff—and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down—and Lord know the truth.

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.

You’re 2 walking by the tomb of Battiades, Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy Laughter at the right moment, over the wine.

I’ll burn my books!

Reader, look, Not at his picture, but his book.

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.

Who says that fictions only and false hair Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty? 3

For all a rhetorician’s rules Teach nothing but to name his tools.

O gracious God! how far have we Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy!

There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl The feast of reason and the flow of soul.

Wit will shine Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.

There still remains, to mortify a wit, The many-headed monster of the pit.

In quibbles angel and archangel join, And God the Father turns a school-divine.

’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.

Let these describe the undescribable.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Every true history is contemporary history. 1

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe. 9

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization. Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.

His true Penelope was Flaubert, He fished by obstinate isles.

Poetry is the subject of the poem.

Like watermen, that row one way and look another.