“Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.
—Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose
Showing posts with label understanding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label understanding. Show all posts
no key
Someone said to me about Pasternak’s poems: ‘Splendid poems when you explain them all like that, but they need a key supplied with them.’
No, not supply a key to the poems (dreams), but the poems themselves are a key to understanding everything. But from understanding to accepting there isn’t just a step, there is no step at all; to understand is to accept, there is no other understanding, any other understanding is non-understanding. Not in vain does the French comprendre mean both ‘understand’ and ‘encompass’—that is, ‘accept’ and ‘include’.
—Marina Tsvetaeva, from title essay of Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), introduced and translated by Angela Livingstone, p. 173.
No, not supply a key to the poems (dreams), but the poems themselves are a key to understanding everything. But from understanding to accepting there isn’t just a step, there is no step at all; to understand is to accept, there is no other understanding, any other understanding is non-understanding. Not in vain does the French comprendre mean both ‘understand’ and ‘encompass’—that is, ‘accept’ and ‘include’.
—Marina Tsvetaeva, from title essay of Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), introduced and translated by Angela Livingstone, p. 173.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The next thing to being a great poet is the power of understanding one.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion, Bk. II, Chap. 3
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion, Bk. II, Chap. 3
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