hats and coats

There is such a thing as Literary Fashion, and prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats.

—Isaac D’Israeli, in the essay “Literary Fashions,” Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3). Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield

nothing too lavish

In a review of Middle Span by George Santayana, in The New Statesman, June 26, 1948, Raymond Mortimer joined [Santayana] with Picasso as the two living Spaniards most conspicuous for genius and said…
"they have both chosen to be expatriates yet retain under their cosmopolitanism a deep Spanishness—the sense “that in the service of love and imagination nothing can be too lavish, too sublime or too festive, yet that all this passion is a caprice, a farce, a contortion, a comedy of illusions.”

Quoted in Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book, a facsimile and transcription, edited and introduced by Milton J. Bates.

near eye

At first art is archaic, the sensible form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in the second stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, a transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account.

The peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail; technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a caprice; and always as it goes on it loses sight of the general in its rendering, and dwells with a near eye on the specific.

—George E. Woodberry, "A New Defence of Poetry," Heart of Man, and Other Papers (Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920)

close sailing

You cannot say it all, in poetry. Where you cannot say it all, you are stinted irremediably in how seriously you can speak. There is that something of lightness in the poetic presentation of themes, be they of the uttermost of inspiring seriousness. The verbal versatility that bejewels the process of poem-making, by requisition, produces an almost continual close sailing to the wind of word-play. The use of metaphor, its tempting relief to the mind so often at a loss for the immediate right provision for the fixed, patterned, poetic word-course, becomes a chronic virtue of permitted caprice of statement.

—Laura (Riding) Jackson, ”Reading for the University of Florida Library (1975),” from “The Failure of Poetry: Selection from the Manuscripts,” edited by John Nolan (Chelsea #69, 2000).