When I first knew [William] Morris nothing could content him but being a monk, and getting to Rome, and then he must be an architect, and apprenticed himself to Street, and worked for two years, but when I came to London and began to paint he threw it all up, and must paint too, and then he must give it up and make poems, and then he must give it up and make window hangings and pretty things, and when he achieved that, he must be a poet again, and then after two or three years of Earthly Paradise time, he must learn dyeing, and lived in a vat, and learned weaving, and knew all about looms, and then made more books, and learned tapestry, and then wanted to smash everything up and begin the world anew, and now it is printing he cares for, and to make wonderfully rich-looking books—and all things he does splendidly—and if he lives the printing will have an end, but not I hope, before Chaucer and the Morte d’Arthur are done; then he’ll do I don’t know what, but every minute will be alive.
—Edward Burns-Jones, c.1890, quoted in Time Remembered (1933) by Frances Horner, p. 14., and in William Morris: Words & Wisdom (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2014)
Showing posts with label talent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label talent. Show all posts
sympathetic magic
My present purpose is to attack estrangement…
It started, for me, from a sensing of something I found myself obeying for some time before, in Call Me Ishmael, it got itself put down as space, a factor of experience I took as of such depth, width, and intensity that, unwittingly, I insisted upon it as fact…by telling three sorts of stories…which I dubbed FIRST FACTS…
I knew no more then than what I did, than to put down space and fact and hope, by the act of sympathetic magic that words are apt to seem when one first uses them, that I would invoke for others those sensations of life I was small witness to, part doer of. But the act of writing the book added a third noun, equally abstract: stance. For after it was done, and other work in verse followed, I discovered that the fact of this space located a man differently in respect to any act, so much so and with such vexation that only in verse did I acquire any assurance that the stance was not in some way idiosyncratic and only a sign of the limits of my talent, only wretched evidence of my lack of engagement at the heart of life.
—Charles Olson, Black Mountain College (1953). Olson’s Journals, 10: 95-96.
Collected Prose of Charles Olson (U. of California Press, 1997), edited by Donald Allen and Ben Friedlander.
It started, for me, from a sensing of something I found myself obeying for some time before, in Call Me Ishmael, it got itself put down as space, a factor of experience I took as of such depth, width, and intensity that, unwittingly, I insisted upon it as fact…by telling three sorts of stories…which I dubbed FIRST FACTS…
I knew no more then than what I did, than to put down space and fact and hope, by the act of sympathetic magic that words are apt to seem when one first uses them, that I would invoke for others those sensations of life I was small witness to, part doer of. But the act of writing the book added a third noun, equally abstract: stance. For after it was done, and other work in verse followed, I discovered that the fact of this space located a man differently in respect to any act, so much so and with such vexation that only in verse did I acquire any assurance that the stance was not in some way idiosyncratic and only a sign of the limits of my talent, only wretched evidence of my lack of engagement at the heart of life.
—Charles Olson, Black Mountain College (1953). Olson’s Journals, 10: 95-96.
Collected Prose of Charles Olson (U. of California Press, 1997), edited by Donald Allen and Ben Friedlander.
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