poetry's way

“though the material of poetry is verbal, its import is not the literal assertion made in the words, but the way the assertion is made, and this involves the sound, the tempo, the aura of associations of the words, the long or short sequences of ideas, the wealth or poverty of transient imagery that contains them, the sudden arrest of fantasy by pure fact, or of familiar fact by sudden fantasy, the suspense of literal meaning by a sustained ambiguity resolved in a long-awaited key-word, and the unifying, all-embracing artifice of rhythm.”

—Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942)

will be written

That city [Tiflis] with all the people I saw in it and with all the things I had gone to experience and all the things I had brought with me will be the same to me as Chopin, Scriabin, Marburg, Venice and Rilke have been, one of the chapters of my Safe Conduct, which goes on all through my life, one of the chapters which, as you know, are not numerous; one of these chapters, and it will be the next one written. I say ‘will be’ because I am a writer, and all this has to be written down and an expression found for it all; I say ‘will be’ because so far as I am concerned it has already become a fact.

—Boris Pasternak, letter to Titian and Nina Tabidze, 13 December 1931, Letters to Georgian Friends, translated from the Russian with an introduction and notes by David Magarshack (Seckler & Warburg, 1967)

--
I do not write poems. Like a novel, they write
Me, and the course of life accompanies them.

Titian Tabidze (Georgian poet, 1895-1937), died in Stalin's purge of 1937.

no inert fact

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald Sherburne (The Free Press, 1978, p. 310), lecture delivered in 1927.