in four lines

Often I’ve had the inclination to say, “I could write that poem in four lines.”

older and shorter

Variation on Pascal: If I was older I’d have written you a shorter poem.

no system

Nietzsche is the one modern philosopher whom the layman has a fair chance of understanding. Perhaps that makes him not a philosopher. Perhaps it makes him a poet. (A non sequitur.) Or is there a connection in this sphere between being understandable and being insane?

Commenting on the unresolved contradictions in Nietzsche’s writing, H.G. Schenk describes what he has left us as ‘the intellectual echo of the recurrent oscillations of his soul, observed with utmost sensitivity’. In introducing Human, All Too Human in R.J. Hollingdale’s translation, Erich Heller remarks that even the most impressive philosophical systems is perched uncomfortably on a throne of rock-bottom stupidity, the self-induced narrow-mindedness which leads man to believe that he, a small part of an immense world, is capable of making absolutely coherent sense of it all. Heller is championing aphorisms, which, through their brevity, achieve ‘a kind’ of finality, one which we know, the world being so immense, isn’t more than a kind of. One effect of eluding narrow-mindedness and resisting schematization, something more commonly observed in poets…

—D. J. Enright, Interplay: a kind of commonplace book (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995)

essence of

Squeeze a parable and get a proverb.

enough already

The poet never thinks ‘More could be said about this’.

long & short of it

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.
—Blaise Pascal

If I had more time I would write a shorter poem.

core story

The poem was a thumbnail novel.

giant killer

A haiku that could humble a poem of a hundred lines.

multum in parvo

The phrase multum in parvo has always had a special significance for me. In its terse and compact Latin diction, it exemplifies exactly what it connotes: much in little. The archetype of brevity, however, is not easy to define. Abstraction, conciseness, symbolism, and imaginative potential are basic in the concept. A multiplicity of detail is concentrated into a unified principle, the particular is transformed into the universal, a largeness of meaning is conveyed with the utmost economy of means. This largeness of meaning should be accomplished by a dramatic impact, in a word: insight with a gasp.

—Carl Zigrosser, Multum In Parvo (George Braziller, 1965)