♥ w. b. yeats

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are:---
(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.
---Yeats, "Magic" (1901)

When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.' I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the song of experience.
---Yeats, letter to Elizabeth Pelham, January 4, 1939

on frost

---Frost was the first American poet to live a considerable living exclusively through poetry, a man paid simply for being a poet (for readings, in universities; the public bard we saw images of last week). Poetry was always a mode of work for Frost, and work was a model of poetic activity. Meaning is always something made, what the poet works on and for. Frost's modernity consists in the idea that truth is concrete and contingent, not a metaphysical matter, not an ideal principle; it is only available in the act (the moment) of deriving it, or constructing it, an act that is ordinary, incompletable, and thus necessarily repeated, an ongoing task. Frost is a materialist who calls attention to the circumstances of imagination: poetry is an encounter between fact and desire, focusing the terms, or conditions, on which something can be known. Tools are in Frost an image of those enabling conditions, and they include, in poetry, meter, rhyme, and all the technical resources of verse, the materials of language.

Professor Langdon Hammer

robert frost's sound of sense

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense. Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words. . . .
. . . The sound of sense, then. You get that. It is the abstract vitality of our speech. It is pure sound--pure form. One who concerns himself with it more than the subject is an artist. But remember we are still talking merely of the raw material of poetry. An ear and an appetite for these sounds of sense is the first qualification of a writer, be it of prose or verse. But if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre. Verse in which there is nothing but the beat of the metre furnished by the accents of the pollysyllabic words we call doggerel. Verse is not that. Neither is it the sound of sense alone. It is the resultant from those two. There are only two or three metres that are worth anything. We depend for variety on the infinite play of accents in the sound of sense.
--Frost to John Bartlett, July 1913


My versification seems to bother people more than I should have expected--I suppose because I have been so long accustomed to thinking of it in my own private way. It is as simple as this: there are the very regular pre-established accent and measure of blank verse; and there are the very irregular accent and measure of speaking intonation. I am never more pleased than when I can get these into strained relation. I like to drag and break the intonation across the meter as waves first comb and then break stumbling on the shingle. That's all but it's no mere figure of speech though one can make figures enough about it.
--Frost to John Cournos, July 1914

Jorge Luis Borges, segun Google