Poetry

Burning the Kendall at both ends.

… all of us pass through a state, in our nonage, when we are poets. A youth of seventeen who is not a poet is simply a donkey: his development has been arrested even anterior to that of a tadpole. But a man of fifty who still writes poetry is either an unfortunate who has never developed, intellectually, beyond his teens, or a conscious buffoon who pretends to be something he isn’t — something far younger and juicier than he actually is.
— H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956), ‘High and Ghostly Matters’, Prejudices: Fourth Series, 1924.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree
— Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) Trees.

[Nota bene: Joyce Kilmer was a man.]

The Lord is the supreme poet, the first cause, the sovereign ruler, subtler than the tiniest particle, inconceivable, bright as the sun, beyond darkness.
— Bhagavad Gita, 8:9, in the translation of Eknath Easwaran, Arkana Books, 1985.

We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles, drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure and exists in us by pleasure alone. The man of science, the chemist and mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this.
— William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850), ‘The Poet’s Duty’, quoted in Charles Mackay (ed.), A Thousand and One Gems of English Prose (n.d.), 131.

Since Homer, everything has been developed except poetry.
— Giacomo Leopardi (1798 – 1837), quoted by Shirley Hazzard, Coming of Age in Australia, Boyer Lectures, 1984, ABC Books, 1985.

Now and then one used to find poets conscientiously using scientific expressions, and getting them wrong — there was a time when ‘refraction’ kept cropping up in verse in a mystifying fashion, and when ‘polarised light’ was used as though writers were under the illusion that it was a specially admirable kind of light.
— C. P. Snow (1905 – 1980), The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Rede Lecture, 1959.

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