faith-based readership

For a poet any readership one might imagine is like a belief in God, it has to be taken on faith alone.

ahead unknown

Artists and poets tend not to belief in predestination.

forever forms

You can see a strange kind of Neoplatonism propounded by certain crackpot defenders of poetic forms. They have come to believe that certain poetic forms are ideal forms, immutable and outside of time.

conversion experience

The day the minister mistook the collected Dickinson for his Bible.

belief system

For a poet language is creed.

immovable attitude

I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.

—Anaïs Nin, August 22, 1936, Fire: From "A Journal of Love, " The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937 (Mariner Books, 1996)

web of belief

The poem as a 'web of belief’. (after Quine)