Literature and Society
- In a point of fact he is really a decadent aesthete who stubbornly confuses literature with painting and refuses to place words in the employ of man and civilization.
- Daily exposed to the headlines of the newspapers, his Olympian superiority or indifference yields slowly to persistent hammering of the facts of his own experience and of contemporary history.
- He is no longer a florist, scissors in hand gathering lovely blossom; he has become a tiller of the soil, spade in hand, digging into the roots of things and planting seeds.
- Having traveled the weary road from the Ivory Tower to jail, he had learned that the only true basis of lasting beauty in literature is—power.
- For a sensitive spirit is easily prone to cynicism and misanthropy unless it is reinforced by the steel of undeviating principle.
- This universal fear of insecurity, chaos, and war . . . This fear has driven them into fashioning a comfortable philosophy of escape through repulsive realities of the contemporary scene.
- The highest form of art is that which springs from the wells of man’s deepest urges and longings—his love of his own kind and his longing to be free.
- For deliberate isolation from the rest of the world and complete indifference to the fortunes of mankind on the part of the artists can only mean one thing: that he is incapable of profound thought and deep feeling and is therefore, to that extent, incapable also of great art.
- But the development of man’s emotional, intellectual and spiritual qualities is impossible save his heart, mind and soul are enriched by fruitful contact with others.
- Propaganda is written with the definite object of influencing people to believe or to do something.
The Day the Dancers Came
- That fall, Chicago was sandman’s town, sleepy valley, drowsy gray, slumberous mistiness from sunup till noon when the clouds drifted away in cauliflower clusters and suddenly it was evening. The lights shone on the avenues like soiled lamps centuries old and the skyscrapers became monsters with a thousand sore eyes.
- “I’m becoming a white man,” Tony had said once, chuckling softly.
- When Fil rushed to his side, Tony drove him away. Or he curled up in the bedsheets like a big infant suddenly hushed in its crying. The next day, he would look all right. When Fil asked him about the previous night, he would reply, “I was dying,” but it sounded more like disgust over a nameless annoyance.
- For Fil, time was the villian. In the beginning, the words he often heard were: too young, too young; but all of a sudden, too young became too old, too late.
- Without telling Tony, he had experimented on recording sounds . . . Did they bring back the moment? He was beginning to think they did.
- Suddenly, he felt as if he were in the center of a group where he was not welcome. All the things he had been trying to hide now showed: the age in his face, his horny hands.
- “Now let me teach you how to keep afloat,” Tony said, but it was not Tony’s voice.
- “There they were.” Fil began, his tone taking on the orator’s pitch, “who could have been my children if I had not left home—or yours, Tony.”
- “All I wanted was to talk to them, guide them around Chicago, spend money them so that they would have something special to remember about us here when they return to our country.”
- “Tony! Tony!” Fil cried, looking towards the sick man’s room, “I’ve lost them all.” Biting his lips, Fil turned towards the wind, startled by the first light of dawn. He hadn’t realized till then the long night was over.
First, A poem Should Be Magical
- First, a poem should be magical,
- Then musical as a seagull.
- It must be brightness moving
- And hold secret a bird’s flowering
- It must be slender as a bell,
- And it must have the wisdom of bows
- And must kneel like a rose.
- It must be able to hear/ The luminance of dove and dear.
- It must be able to hide/ What it seeks, like a bride.
- And over all I would like to hover/ God, smiling form the poem’s cover.
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