Art

The immortal god of harmony.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

A dance is a measured pace, as a verse is a measured speech.

I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like. on starting Emma

The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?

Art is born of humiliation.

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole:

I love the sound of the bone against the plate and the fortress-like look of it lying before me in a moat of risotto, the meat soft as the leg of an angel who has lived a purely airborne existence.

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer And swerving easily away, as though to protect What it advertises.

Total absorption in poetry is one of the finest things in existence— It should not make you feel guilty. Everyone is absorbed in something. The sailor is absorbed in the sea. Poetry is the mediation of life.

The poet is a little god.

And I must borrow every changing shape To find expression.

It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. “And give up verse, my boy, There’s nothing in it.”

Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase!

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.

For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime” In the old sense. Wrong from the start— No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date.

That scrawny cry—It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun.

There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain.

His self and the sun were one And his poems, although makings of his self, Were no less makings of the sun.

Total grandeur of a total edifice, Chosen by an inquisitor of structures For himself. He stops upon this threshold As if the design of all his words takes form And frame from thinking and is realized.

And, capable, created in his mind, Eventual victor, out of the martyrs’ bones The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made.