It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.
—Mark Rothko, The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art (Yale Univ. Press, 2012)
Showing posts with label reality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reality. Show all posts
by indirect means
The relationship between an artist and reality is always an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can only approach that reality by indirect means.
—Richard Wilbur, Quarterly Review of Literature, 7, p.189
—Richard Wilbur, Quarterly Review of Literature, 7, p.189
negation
To put it simply, by the time of Weldon Kees’s arrival, the dominant note in poetry on both sides of the Atlantic was that of negation of the modern reality. The source of this note was, of course, European Romanticism; its current mouthpiece, Modernism. To be sure, the reality by and large did not deserve any better. On the whole, art’s treatment of contemporary reality is almost invariably punitive—so much so that art itself, especially the incurably semantic art of poetry, can be suspected of having a strong Calvinist streak.
—Joseph Brodsky, “Weldon Kees,” (APR, July/Aug. 2010; reprinted from The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1993)
—Joseph Brodsky, “Weldon Kees,” (APR, July/Aug. 2010; reprinted from The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1993)
greater reality
A poetry of longing: not for escape, but for a greater reality.
—Theodore Roethke, Straw For The Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday & Co., 1972), edited by David Wagoner
—Theodore Roethke, Straw For The Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday & Co., 1972), edited by David Wagoner
step barefoot into reality
There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of
life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips
among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into
reality,
They would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly
From “Large Red Man Reading” by Wallace Stevens
life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips
among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into
reality,
They would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly
From “Large Red Man Reading” by Wallace Stevens
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