Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences |
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Popular passages
Page 135 - Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim lands of peace . It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.
Page 135 - Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them. Don't imagine that a thing will "go" in verse just because it's too dull to go in prose.
Page 182 - I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...
Page 22 - is not jewelry, it has quite other aims than perfection, and the more one thinks of 'how it is done' the less one gets it done. These critical indulgences lead along a fatal path, away from every natural interest towards a preposterous emptiness of technical effort, a monstrous egotism of artistry, of which the later work of Henry James is the monumental warning. 'It...
Page 36 - Nevertheless, a Novel was the rendering of an Affair: of one embroilment, one set of embarrassments, one human coil, one psychological progression. From this the Novel got its Unity. No doubt it might have its caesura - or even several; but these must be brought about by temperamental pauses, markings of time when the treatment called for them. But the whole novel was to be an exhaustion of aspects, was to proceed to one culmination, to reveal once and for all, in the last sentence, or the penultimate;...
Page 193 - I had to make for myself the discovery that verse must be at least as well written as prose if it is to be poetry.
Page 84 - And a peculiarly London sun — against which nothing could be said except that it looked bloodshot — glorified all this by its stare. It hung at a moderate elevation above Hyde Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance. The very pavement under Mr. Verloc's feet had an old-gold tinge in that diffused light, in which neither wall, nor tree, nor beast, nor man cast a shadow. Mr. Verloc was going westward through a town without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered old gold.
Page 112 - ... gun' was the final argument. The life that Conrad gives you is somewhere half-way between the two; it is dominated — but less dominated — by the revolver than that of Stephen Crane, and dominated, but less dominated, by the moral scruple than that of James. But the approach to life is the same with all these three; they show you that disillusionment is to be found alike at the tea-table, in the slum and on the tented field. That is of great service to our Republic.
Page 130 - ... and this, says Ford, accounted for their hostility to Impressionism. Whereas Ford was calling for the "frank expression of personality" in 1914, five years later he described the leading Impressionist tenet as the belief that "the artist must aim at the absolute suppression of himself in his rendering of his...
Page 149 - THE hard sand breaks, and the grains of it are clear as wine. Far off over the leagues of it, the wind, playing on the wide shore, piles little ridges, and the great waves break over it. But more than the many-foamed ways of the sea, I know him of the triple path-ways, Hermes, who awaits.