Entry 290

“The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them."
Wallace Stevens

“After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption."
Wallace Stevens

“In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all."
Wallace Stevens

“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.”
Wallace Stevens

“Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.”
Wallace Stevens

“The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.”
Wallace Stevens

“Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.”
Wallace Stevens

Entry 289

La Belle Dame Sans Merci
By Sir Frank Dicksee

"...if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all..."
John Keats

"Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose! Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this."
John Keats

"I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read--I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School--and I will call the Child able to read, the Soulmade from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul! A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, It is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the mind or intelligence sucks its identity--As various as the Lives of Men are--so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence-"
John Keats