Eliot

by tantricslide

Posted to Utterances on 2002-06-22 12:44:00

Parent message is 214813
….. but we should remind ourselves that criticrism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

The progress of an artist is a continual selfsacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion: it is not the expression of personality but escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.
– Introduction, Baudelaire’s Intimate Joural (1930)

The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorded in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.