Remarks by Conrad Aiken | V2Melody Quotations

“Chinese poetry seems more than any other a cry from the bewildered heart of humanity.”

Recognising a universal human sorrow beneath culturally distant forms · Essay, Sunt Rerum Lacrimae: Chinese Poetry, Scepticisms (1919)

“Poetry of this sort is not a window through which one may see, but a picture hung on the wall.”

Distinguishing decorative poetry from poetry that interprets human experience · Essay, American Richness and English Distinction, Scepticisms (1919)

“For magic is itself a changing thing. The sparrow of today is the phoenix of tomorrow, and vice versa.”

Reflecting on how literary taste continually transforms the ordinary and the marvellous · Essay, The Mortality of Magic, Scepticisms (1919)

“They appear to remember that, after all, literature should be drawn from life, not from literature.”

Valuing direct experience over imitation of inherited literary conventions · Essay, Confectionery and Caviar, Scepticisms (1919)

“The conception of what it is that constitutes the lyric scope has, if anything, petrified.”

Criticising the narrow conventions that had come to limit lyric poetry · Essay, Narrative Poetry and the Vestigial Lyric, Scepticisms (1919)

“It is not verbal merely, nor rhythmic; for it remains in translation. It springs from the ideas themselves.”

Locating literary power in the relationships between ideas rather than sound alone · Essay, New Curiosity Shop and Jean de Bosschère, Scepticisms (1919)

“Can one safely prophesy about any poet? It is doubtful.”

Warning against confident predictions about an artist's future development · Essay, The Higher Vaudeville: Vachel Lindsay, Scepticisms (1919)

“The fact is that in such cases the temperament comes first, the theory afterwards.”

Suggesting that artistic theories often rationalise instincts already present in the artist · Essay, Poetic Realism: Carl Sandburg, Scepticisms (1919)

“It is more striking to play a tune on the Chinese p'i-pa than on the banjo.”

Observing how rarity and unfamiliarity can be used to create an impression of distinction · Essay, A Pointless Pointillist: Ezra Pound, Scepticisms (1919)

“We all remain children at least in part.”

Recognising the enduring presence of imagination and childhood within adulthood · Essay, Romantic Traditionalism: Alan Seeger, Scepticisms (1919)

“Is poetry to be merely a perfume reserved for our moments of languor?”

Challenging the restriction of poetry to beauty, sentiment and pleasant reverie · Essay, Poetry as Supernaturalism: William Stanley Braithwaite, Scepticisms (1919)

“Fortunately, aesthetic judgment is not entirely solipsistic, but is in part guided by certain aesthetic laws, vague but none the less usable.”

Maintaining that artistic judgement is personal but not wholly arbitrary · Essay, The Technique of Polyphonic Prose: Amy Lowell, Scepticisms (1919)

“It is in a kind of redundancy, on the psychic plane, that an artist's character is most manifest.”

Suggesting that an artist is revealed most clearly by recurring inner excesses · Essay, Possessor and Possessed: John Gould Fletcher, Scepticisms (1919)

Art
Identity

“Such a poetry attains a vitreous lucidity which has its own odd heatless charm.”

Describing verse whose crystalline precision is beautiful but emotionally cool · Essay, The Melodic Line: D. H. Lawrence, Scepticisms (1919)

“The literary abbozzo—or, to be more precise, the poetic abbozzo—demands a high degree of skill, a very sure instinct.”

Arguing that deliberate incompleteness requires discipline rather than carelessness · Essay, The Literary Abbozzo: Lola Ridge, Scepticisms (1919)

“If prose could convey subtler emotional moods and impressions than poetry, why write poetry?”

Defending poetry as a uniquely subtle instrument of emotional expression · Essay, The Function of Rhythm: Ford Madox Hueffer, Scepticisms (1919)

“Our enjoyment of art is consequent upon the satisfaction of two kinds of hunger: hunger for beauty and hunger for knowledge.”

Identifying beauty and understanding as complementary needs answered by art · Essay, The Two Magics: Edgar Lee Masters, Scepticisms (1919)

“But none the less, if we are to help poetry at all in this wilderness, we cannot rest content with amusement.”

Calling for serious critical engagement rather than detached entertainment · Essay, Poetry in America, Scepticisms (1919)

“If poetry were only an emotional discharge, it would be very much less complex than it is.”

Rejecting the idea that poetry is simply an unfiltered release of feeling · Essay, The Mechanism of Poetic Inspiration, Scepticisms (1919)

“They represent my own particular attempt to urge the poetic currents of the day in a direction that might be favourable to me.”

Frankly acknowledging the personal interests that can shape literary criticism · Essay, Apologia Pro Specie Sua, Scepticisms (1919)

“It was his decision that his life had to be lived off-stage, behind the scenes, out of view.”

Expressing his lifelong preference for privacy over literary celebrity · Autobiographical essay, Ushant (1952)

“The poet was and is the one who invents language. Which is tantamount to inventing experience, or awareness.”

Presenting poetic language as a means of enlarging human perception · Letter to John Gould Fletcher

“What you think or feel that is secretly you—shamefully you—intoxicatingly you.”

Urging writers to confront the most private and uncomfortable parts of themselves · Letter, quoted by Malcolm Cowley

“To give the lowdown on himself, and through himself on humanity.”

Defining the poet's task as candid self-examination that reveals something universal · Letter, quoted by Malcolm Cowley

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