The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.
Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.
But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn’t worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.
The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.
If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.
You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind- with one thought less, each year.
I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.
A man’s hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
The natural object is always the adequate symbol.
Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.