(Reading, Pennsylvania, 1879 - Hartford, Connecticut, EE.UU., 1955)
Adagia (selección)
El progreso en cualquier aspecto es un movimiento a través de cambios de terminología.
El poeta hace de los gusanos vestidos de seda.
La relación del arte con la vida es de primera importancia, especialmente en la era escéptica, puesto que, en la ausencia de una creencia en Dios, la mente vuelve a sus propias creaciones y las examina, no sólo desde un punto de vista estético, sino también por lo que revelan, por lo que validan o invalidan, por la ayuda que proporcionan.
Poesía y materia poética son términos intercambiables.
Toda poesía es poesía experimental.
En poesía, debes amar las palabras, las ideas, las imágenes y los ritmos con toda tu capacidad para amar cualquier cosa.
No hay alas como el significado.
Vivimos en la mente.
No todos los días el mundo se ordena a sí mismo en un poema.
Un poeta mira el mundo como un hombre mira a una mujer.
Poesía es el arte del estudioso.
La lengua es un ojo.
Tiene que haber algo de campesino en todo poeta.
Dios es un postulado del ego.
La poesía debe resistir a la inteligencia casi con éxito.
El poeta es un dios, o el joven poeta es un dios. El poeta viejo es un vagabundo.
El fallo esencial del surrealismo es que inventa sin descubrir.
No existe una metáfora de una metáfora. A través de metáforas no se progresa. Por eso la realidad es el elemento indispensable de cada metáfora. Cuando digo que el hombre es un dios, es muy fácil ver que si también digo que dios es otra cosa, dios ha devenido realidad.
Todo el impulso de la mente se dirige hacia la abstracción.
A la larga, la verdad no importa.
En 'De la simple existencia', traducción de Andrés Sánchez Robayna,
Galaxia Gutemberg/Círculo de Lectores, Barcelona, 2003.
***
Otra versión
El progreso en cualquier aspecto es un movimiento a través de cambios de terminología.
El mérito de los poetas es tan aburrido como el mérito de la gente.
La literatura es la mejor parte de la vida. A lo cual parece inevitablemente necesario añadir: a condición de que la vida sea la mejor parte de la literatura.
La exactitud de la observación es el equivalente de la exactitud del pensamiento.
Un poema es un meteoro.
La poesía no es personal.
La poesía es un medio de redención.
Lo real es sólo la base, pero es la base.
Toda poesía es experimental.
Leemos la poesía con los nervios.
El exquisito ambiente de los hechos.
Vivir en el mundo pero fuera de las concepciones existentes sobre él.
No todos los días el mundo se organiza en un poema.
Un poeta mira el mundo como un hombre mira una mujer.
El supremo valor es la realidad.
El mundo es la única cosa en la que vale la pena pensar.
La cosa vista se convierte en la cosa no vista. Lo contrario es, o parece ser, imposible.
La lengua es un ojo.
Dios es el símbolo de algo que bien puede tomar otras formas, como, por ejemplo, la de alta poesía.
La gran conquista es la conquista de la realidad. No es suficiente con presentar la vida, por un momento, como pudo haber sido.
Un poema es un faisán.
La realidad es un vacío.
Todos los hombres son asesinos.
Debe haber siempre algo de campesino en cada poeta.
Aristóteles es una rémora.
El cuerpo es el gran poema.
El propósito de la poesía es contribuir a la felicidad del hombre.
El poeta llega a las palabras como la naturaleza a los palos secos.
Un poema es un café.
La poesía debe oponerse a la inteligencia casi con éxito.
La cabal flor de lo real, no el fruto californiano de lo ideal.
Pensamiento es vida.
El poeta es un dios, o el joven poeta es un dios. El viejo poeta es un vagabundo.
La poesía es la dicha del lenguaje.
La poesía es una cura de la mente.
La realidad es el verdadero centro del espíritu.
Proposita. 1. Dios y la imaginación son una misma cosa. 2. El objeto imaginado es el imaginador.
Lo segundo iguala el objeto imaginado y el imaginador. De ahí, supongo, que el imaginador es Dios.
El objeto absoluto, ligeramente modificado, es una metáfora del objeto.
La poesía descubre la relación de los hombres con los hechos.
No se puede perder el tiempo en ser moderno cuando hay tantas cosas importantes que ser.
El mundo está a merced de la mente más potente, ya sea esta potencia la de la salud o la de la insanía, la de la astucia o la de la buena voluntad.
Un cambio de estilo es un cambio de tema.
La mente que en el cielo creó la tierra y la mente que en la tierra creó el cielo fueron, en verdad, una.
La política es la lucha por la existencia.
Es la creencia y no el dios lo que cuenta.
La poesía debe ser irracional.
Adagia, Dirección General de Cultura y Fundarte, Caracas, 1977. De Opus Posthumus, A.Knopf, Nueva York, 1957, traducción de Guillermo Sucre. Extraído de Otra Iglesia es Imposible.
***
To give a sense of the freshness or vividness of life is a valid purpose for poetry. A didactic purpose justifies itself in the mind of the teacher; a philosophical purpose justifies itself in the mind of the philosopher. It is not that one purpose is as justifiable as another but that some purposes are pure, others impure. Seek those purposes that are purely the purposes of the pure poet.
* * *
Literature is the better part of life. To this it seems invariably necessary to add, provided life is the better part of literature.
* * *
After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Art, broadly, is the form of life or the sound or color of life. Considered as form (in the abstract) it is often indistinguishable from life itself.
The poet seems to confer his identity on the reader. It is easier to recognize this when listening to music - I mean this sort of thing: the transference.
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
* * *
The collecting of poetry from one's experience as one goes along is not the same thing as merely writing poetry.
The relation of art to life is of the first importance especially in a skeptical age since, in the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support that they give.
A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.
Art involves vastly more than the sense of beauty.
Life is the reflection of literature.
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
* * *
The imagination wishes to be indulged.
A new meaning is the equivalent of a new word.
Poetry is not personal.
* * *
A dead romantic is a falsification.
The romantic cannot be seen through: it is for the moment willingly not seen through.
Poetry is a means of redemption.
Poetry is a form of melancholia. Or rather, in melancholy, it is one of the "aultres choses soalatieuses."
* * *
The real is only the base, but it is the base.
* * *
The poem reveals itself only to the ignorant man.
* * *
The relation between the poetry of experience and the poetry of rhetoric is not the same thing as the relation between the poetry of reality and that of the imagination. Experience, at least in the case of a poet of any scope, is much broader than reality.
To a large extent, the problem of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
* * *
Abstraction is a part of idealism. It is in that sense that it is ugly.
In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality.
Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this.
* * *
All poetry is experimental poetry.
The bare image and the image as a symbol are the contrast: the image without meaning and the image as meaning. When the image is used to suggest something else, it is secondary. Poetry as an imaginative thing consists of more than lies on the surface.
* * *
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
* * *
It is the belief and not the god that counts.
* * *
What we see in the mind is as real to us as what we see by the eye.
Poetry must be irrational.
The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.
Poetry increases the feeling for reality.
The mind is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.
There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.
There is nothing beautiful in life except life.
There is no wing like meaning.
Consider:
1.) That the whole world is material for poetry.
2.) That there is not a specifically poetic material.
One reads poetry with one's nerves.
* * *
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
The imagination is the romantic.
Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions.
* * *
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe it willingly.
* * *
Wine and music are not good until afternoon. But poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in solitude and in the times of solitude as, for example, in the earliest morning.
* * *
Poetry is a poetic conception, however expressed. A poem is poetry expressed in words. But in a poem there is a poetry of words. Obviously, a poem may consist of several poetries.
* * *
Ethics are no more a part of poetry than they are of painting.
* * *
As the reason destroys, the poet must create.
* * *
It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem.
* * *
The aesthetic order includes all other orders but is not limited to them.
Religion is dependent on faith. But aesthetics is independent of faith. The relative positions of the two might be reversed. It is possible to establish aesthetics in the individual mind as immeasurably a greater thing than religion. Its present state is the result of the difficulty of establishing it except in the individual mind.
* * *
Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.
Poetry is the scholar's art.
* * *
To study and to understand the fictive world is the function of the poet.
* * *
God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, as, for example, the form of high poetry.
The time will come when poems like Paradise will seem very triste contraptions.
* * *
Reality is a vacuum.
All men are murderers.
The word must be the thing it represents; otherwise, it is a symbol. It is a question of identity.
* * *
In dramatic poetry the imagination attaches itself to a heightened reality.
* * *
There must be something of the peasant in every poet.
* * *
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
* * *
Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
* * *
Romanticism is to poetry what the decorative is to painting.
* * *
A poem is a cafe. (Restoration.)
Poets acquire humility.
Thought tends to collect in pools.
* * *
Life is not free from its forms.
* * *
We have made too much of life. A journal of life is rarely a journal of happiness.
* * *
Poetry sometimes crowns the search for happiness. It is itself a search for happiness.
* * *
Esthetique is the measure of a civilization; not the sole measure, but a measure.
Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
The romantic exists in precision as well as in imprecision.
* * *
A change of style is a change of subject.
* * *
The romantic is the first phase of (a non-pejorative) lunacy.
* * *
The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.
* * *
I have no life except in poetry. No doubt that would be true if my whole life was free for poetry.
* * *
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
* * *
French and English constitute a single language.
* * *
The momentum of the mind is all toward abstraction.
* * *
In the long run the truth does not matter.
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