"Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us. If the poet presents directly feelings which overwhelm him, and keeps nothing back to linger as an aftertaste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot start the hands and feet involuntarily waving and tapping in time, far less strengthen morality and refine culture, set heaven and earth in motion and call up the spirits!”
—Wei T’ai (eleventh century), epigraph to Poems of the Late T’ang, edited and with an introduction by A.C. Graham, on sale today, January 22, 2008
That reminds me of a passage about searching for the right expression that was quoted on the great history blog The Edge of the American West over the weekend (http://tinyurl.com/2ggemd). Talking about searching for the right words to fill a blank space (....) in a poem, the author writes,
"Between the subjective and objective sides there is not a relation of representation or likeness. The words don’t copy the blank. How can a set of words be at all like a blank? Rather, what was implicit is changed by explicating it. But it is not just any change. The explication releases that tension, which was the ……. But what the blank was is not just lost or altered; rather, that tension is carried forward by the words. Of course the new phrases were not already in the blank. They did not yet exist at all."
Posted by: Levi Stahl | January 22, 2008 at 10:27 AM