happening in there

Psychiatry and psychology take the study of emotions seriously, but poetry is the lab of emotions.

great emotions

The poet makes [humankind] realize how great are the great emotions which they, in a smaller way, have already experienced.

— G. K. Chesterton, The Soul of Wit: G. K. Chesterton on William Shakespeare (Dover Publications, 2012)

ready for I

...I'm just really beginning to let myself say "I" because I feel that now I can do it without the kind of crudity with which some people who have just begun to write poetry write about their feelings.

I always feel that what…people should be doing, if they really want to be poets, is writing objectively. Writing about a chair, a tree outside their window. So much more of themselves really would get into the poem, than when they just say “I.” The “I-ness” doesn’t come across, because it’s too crude…For instance, the objective earlier poems of William Carlos Williams (who, in the ripeness of old age has been saying “I” in quite a different way) say so much more than what they superficially appear to be saying. They’re quite objective little descriptions of this and that, and yet, especially when one adds them together, they say a great deal about the man. In a much deeper more impressive way than if he if he’d spent the same years describing his emotions.

—Denise Levertov, in an interview with David Ossman, The Sullen Art (Corinth Books, 1963), interviews with modern American poets.

unmoved

Too much of a stoic to be a poet.

with nothing to bring

if representative form has value, it is as form, not as representation. The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.

—Clive Bell, Art (Oxford U. Press, 1987, p. 25)

[Of course, one might ask, "What choice have we? It's not as though we can set aside all prior experience before we address a work of art."]

without stops

The poem as ‘elevator pitch’ in free fall from the seventieth floor of one’s emotions.

at the back of the mind

Muse poetry is composed at the back of the mind: an unaccountable product of a trance in which the emotions of love, fear, anger, or grief are profoundly engaged, though at the same time powerfully disciplined; in which intuitive thought reigns supralogically, and personal rhythm subdues metre to its purposes. The effect on the readers of Muse poetry, which its opposite poles of ecstasy and melancholia, is what the French call a frisson, and the Scots call a ‘grue’—meaning the shudder provoked by fearful or supernatural experiences.

—Robert Graves, “The Dedicated Poet,” Oxford Addresses on Poetry (Doubleday & Co., 1962)

disturbing intrusion of elements

“I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me. The technical obstacles of painting perhaps dictate the form. It derives also from the limitations of personality, and such may be the simplifications that I have attempted. I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds. The struggle to prevent this is, I think, the common lot of all painters to whom the invention of arbitrary forms has lesser interest. I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions. I find any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom.”

—Edward Hopper, “Notes on Painting,” 1933, MOMA exhibit catalogue