Begin to Begin

     Many young people have confessed to me after a long time, that they came to see me, either as the result of a wager, or because they had read my name on a placard, or in order to disobey their families.
     Their silence demoralized me. I embroidered it with a thousand reasons. It was merely due to their fear of talking nonsense.
     This does not prevent me from falling into the trap again. The youth intimidates us because we imagine it to be secretive. This is the strength of its silence. We furnish it out of our own pocket. It soon realizes this, and uses it as a weapon. Its silence becomes systematic. Its aim is to put us out of countenance.
     It is important to be on one's guard. When the young people have gone, this deathly silence sinks deep into us and works havoc. We, its victims, find in it a criticism of what we are doing. We weigh it up. We agree. We are disgusted. We grow paralysed. We fall from the tree, open-beaked.
     I see some artists who are exposed to this adventure losing their footing, incapable of regaining their balance and unable to do without their tormentors.
— Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being, Sprigge (tr.), pp. 123-124.

     "But," you will say, "how can you reconstruct the truth as of that time and express it after so many years?"
     Ah, my indiscreet and grossly ignorant beloved, it is this very capacity that makes us masters of the earth, this capacity to restore the past and thus to prove the instability of our impressions and the vanity of our affections. Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that in turn will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms.
— Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner (1880), Grossman (tr.), p. 77.

     I do not believe that a violent imitation of the horrors of our times is the concern of poetry. Horrors are taken for granted. Disorder is ordinary. People in general take more and more 'in their stride' — hides grow thicker. I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
— Denise Levertov, from her Statement in The New American Poetry, Donald M. Allen, pp. 411-412.

        FRANKLIN JONES
If I could have lived another year
I could have finished my flying machine,
And become rich and famous.
Hence it is fitting the workman
Who tried to chisel a dove for me
Made it look more like a chicken.
For what is it all but being hatched,
And running about the yard,
To the day of the block?
Save that a man has an angel's brain,
And sees the ax from the first!
— Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, p. 104.