Poetic Diction Quotes Part 4

p.181: “It is only when we have risen from beholding the creature into beholding creation that our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres.”

p.196: “It is precisely when such a writer starts complaining that his author uses the same word in two different senses that the discerning reader will prick up the ears of his imagination in the hope of acquiring some real knowledge.”

p.210-1: “The Greeks had no such word as ‘principle’: they called what I have been speaking of – with that divine concreteness which makes the mere language a fountain of strength for the exhausted modern intelligence – simply poiein and paschein – Do and Suffer.”

p.222: “It should be noted that Poetic Diction does not simply exalt the Poetic at the expense of the Prosaic, but emphasizes their essential relation, their dependence upon each other, and indeed their interpenetration.”

p.223: “But to take the Poetic really seriously is another matter. It is not to slang the Prosaic, and with it the whole world of science and technology, as the French Symbolists did, and hide yourself away in an ivory tower of ‘art.’ It is to begin to work on the interpenetration of the two by seeking to overcome in a man’s own experience what Coleridge termed the ‘outness’ of the phenomenal world. To say that this involves experiencing that world and his own individual spirit, not as other, but as ‘opposite’ is perhaps to say something. It is indeed to say what Coleridge said.”

p.224: “There is much work still to be done in revealing the part played by that underground stream in the development of modern science. Kepler is an obvious example, but we also need a new and unbiased biography of Isaac Newton and a study, not based on petitio principii, of such matters as the relation between alchemy and chemistry, astrology and astronomy.”