Absurdists

"Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction."

"The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination."

"The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it."

"What the poet has in mind . . . is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives."

"At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind."

"The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos."

"It may be dismissed, on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction: and, on the other hand, if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free — if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished its purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or ceremonial robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation. This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter. But perhaps the same is true of many of the more prodigious things of life and death."

"The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have."

"Reality is the beginning not the end, Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega, Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."

"There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel."

"The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary . . . What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact..."

"For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and . . . he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief … The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.""

"It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade."

"That scrawny cry — It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality."

"A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one."

"Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf. This arrival in the wild country of the soul, All approaches gone, being completely there, Where the wild poem is a substitute For the woman one loves or ought to love, One wild rhapsody a fake for another.You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra Hums and you say "The world in a verse,A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains, Women invisible in music and motion and color," After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala."

"Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate."

"That's what misery is, Nothing to have at heart. It is to have or nothing.It is a thing to have, A lion, an ox in his breast, To feel it breathing there.Corazon, stout dog, Young ox, bow-legged bear, He tastes its blood, not spit.He is like a man In the body of a violent beast. Its muscles are his own...The lion sleeps in the sun. Its nose is on its paws. It can kill a man."

"After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun."

"One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough."

"If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed, As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is; As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien, The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass Of which we are too distantly a part."

"Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed: The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps, The aureole above the humming house... It can never be satisfied, the mind, never."

"Yet it depends on yours. The two are one. They are a plural, a right and left, a pair, Two parallels that meet if only in"

"The meeting of their shadows or that meet In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay. But your war ends. And after it you return"

"With six meats and twelve wines or else without To walk another room...Monsieur and comrade, The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines."

"Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends."

"One of the limits of reality Presents itself in Oley when the hay, Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.… Things stop in that direction and since they stop The direction stops and we accept what is As good. The utmost must be good and is…"

"His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood. And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the solider dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech."

"They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational,Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street, I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo."

"The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there."

"These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections"

"I can Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them, Like men besides, like men in light secluded, Enjoying angels."

"A thing final in itself and, therefore, good: One of the vast repetitions final in Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round And round and round, the merely going round, Until merely going round is a final good, The way wine comes at a table in a wood."

"There is a month, a year, there is a time In which majesty is a mirror of the self: I have not but I am and as I am, I am."

"But to impose is not To discover. To discover an order as of A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather,It is possible, possible, possible. It must Be possible. It must be that in time The real will from its crude compoundings come,Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike, Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real, To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of an absolute — Angel, Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear The luminous melody of proper sound."

"What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud, Serenely gazing at the violent abyss, Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory, Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space, Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight, Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied? Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?"

"Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master."

"Is it he or is it I that experience this?"

"The words they spoke were voices that she heard. She looked at them and saw them as they were And what she felt fought off the barest phrase."

"The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,Beyond which fact could not progress as fact. Thereon the learning of the man conceived Once more night’s pale illuminations, goldBeneath, far underneath, the surface of His eye and audible in the mountain of His ear, the very material of his mind."

"Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew. The nothingness was a nakedness, a pointBeyond which thought could not progress as thought. He had to choose. But it was not a choice Between excluding things. It was not a choiceBetween, but of. He chose to include the things That in each other are included, the whole, The complicate, the amassing harmony."

"They married well because the marriage-place Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell. They were love’s characters come face to face."

"This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon We loved but would no marriage make. Anon The one refused the other one to take, Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine."

"Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration."

"Each must the other take as sign, short sign To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements."

"He imposes orders as he thinks of them, As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair."

"The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window Did not desire that feathery argentines Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them"

"It was enough for her that she remembered."

"Red-in-red repetitions never going Away,a little rusty, a little rouged, A little roughened and ruder, a crownThe eye could not escape, a red renown Blowing itself upon the tedious ear."

"The difficultest rigor is forthwith, On the image of what we see, to catch from that Irrational moment its unreasoning, As when the sun comes rising, when the sea Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed. Yet we are shaken by them as if they were. We reason about them with a later reason."