living part

I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the poem's life.

I believe content determines form, and yet that content is discovered only in form. Like everything living, it is a mystery. The revelation of form itself can be a deep joy; yet I think form as means should never obtrude, whether from invention or carelessness, between the reader and the essential force of the poem, it must be so fused with that force.

—Denise Levertov, from her statement for Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry: 1945–1960.

ursprache

When the living truth that is implicit in the Ursprache is finally allowed to express itself in accord with its origin, it will do so, Fichte claims, by means of the transformative power of poetry. Fichte agrees with his contemporaries Schiller, Schelling, and Hölderin when he claims that “the thinker (der Denker)…is a poet (Dichter).” A truly original thinker represents in images, as a poet does, the truth of sensual life and in this representation is able to overcome remaining oppositions between subject and object in order to create a newer, more spiritual, comprehensive whole.

—Andrew Gordon Fiala, The Philosopher’s Voice (SUNY Press, 2002)

conjectures at random

Let us not conjecture at random about the greatest things.

—Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500BC)
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After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts would be soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, preface to Philosophical Investigations
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