vital organ

A good poem while entering the body via the brain, will lodge itself under the sternum, close by vital organs, the heart and the lungs.

all art

Little by little, pictures encumbered all the rooms, till only a room or two was left for the purposes of the man who required to eat, sleep, entertain his friends. Little by little the hours in which he was still the man whom he was so well, became rarer. His house was already almost a museum, his flesh and blood little more than the place where a work of art was being accomplished.

—Marcel Proust “Gustave Moreau,” Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, 1896-1919 (Dell Publishing Co., 1964), translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

poet within the poet

What is probably new and startling in the work of Dylan Thomas is that, in dragging into light his versions of “the hidden causes” which he mentions, he has given an articulate voice to other parts of the body than the romantic heart—to the glands and the nerves, that is—and has, in considerable measure, freed them from the poetically sterile reason.
[…]
Although he is suitably interested in most phases of life, his impulse comes primarily from within his own body. He is the poet within the poet, and is generally dependent upon no externalities for his subject. This, then, I would say, is one of his main contributions to poetry: he has given voices and eyes to the part of the being which had formerly been dumb and blind; he has given the body a poetic aura…

—Henry Treece, Dylan Thomas: Dog Among the Fairies (Lindsay Drummond Ltd., 1949)