repetitions or rhymes

No wonder that a sensibility so exquisite and so voluminous as that of Proust, filled with endless images and their distant reverberations, could be rescued from distraction only by finding certain repetitions or rhymes in this experience….Thus he required two phenomena to reveal to him one essence, as if essences needed to appear a second time in order to appear at all. A mind less volatile and retentive, but more concentrated and loyal, might easily have discerned the eternal essence in any single momentary fact. It might also have felt the scale of values imposed on things by human nature, and might have been carried towards some by an innate love and away from others by a quick repulsion: something which in Proust is remarkably rare. Yet this very inhumanity and innocent openness, this inclination to be led on by endlessly rambling perception, makes his testimony to the reality of essences all the more remarkable. We could not have asked for a more competent or more unexpected witness to the fact that life as it flows is so much time wasted, and that nothing can ever be recovered or truly possessed save under the form of eternity which is also, as he tell us, the form of art.

—George Santayana, “Proust on Essences,” Obiter Scripta: Lectures, Essays and Reviews (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), edited by Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz

[The above quote could be applied to the poetry of John Ashbery.]

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.

sublimity of the spectacle

…imagine the stars, undiminished in number, without losing any of their astronomical significance and divine immutability, marshalled in geometrical patterns; say in a Latin cross, with the words In hoc signo vinces in a scroll around them. The beauty of the illumination would be perhaps increased, and its import, practical, religious, cosmic, would surely be a little plainer; but where would be the sublimity of the spectacle? [And he answers.] Irretrievably lost.

—George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (Scribners, 1896).

violates the superficial

Daniel Halpern, in his introduction to Holy Fire: Nine Visionary Poets and the Quest for Enlightenment, offers three criteria for visionary poems: “First, they must honor their language (oral or written), whether it be English, French, German, Kashmiri, Hindi, Sanskrit, or Persian, acknowledging Santayana’s observation that ‘the height of poetry is to speak the language of the gods.’ Second, the poems must fulfill, with unerring precision, the requirements of their form, whatever that form turns out to be. And third, the poetry must operate in a visionary realm—that is, present a view of the world that violates the superficial, reaches through the surface to touch the primal material. Wordsworth would call this act the seeing into the life of things; Ruskin wrote, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way…To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—all in one.”

—Lisa Russ Spaar, The Hide-And-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (Drunken Boat Media, 2013)

complete equipment

The poet is a rebuilder of the imagination…And he is not a complete poet if his whole imagination is not attuned and his whole experience composed into a single symphony.

For his complete equipment, then, it is necessary, in the first place, that he sing; that his voice be pure and well pitched, and that his numbers flow; then, at a higher stage, his images must fit with one another; he must be euphuistic, coloring his thoughts with many reflected lights of memory and suggestion, so that their harmony may be rich and profound; again, at a higher stage, he must be sensuous and free, that is, he must build up his world with the primary elements of experience, not with conventions of common sense or intelligence; he must draw the whole soul into his harmonies, even if in doing so he disintegrates the partial systemizations of experience made by abstract science in the categories of prose.

—George Santayana, “The Elements and Functions of Poetry,” Aesthetics and the Arts (McGraw-Hill, 1968), edited by Lee A Jacobus

highest ideality

[T]he function of poetry, like that of science, can only be fulfilled by the conception of harmonies that become clearer as they grow richer. As the chance note that comes to be supported by a melody becomes in that melody determinate and necessary, and as the melody, when woven into a harmony, is explicated in that harmony and fixed beyond recall; so the single emotion, the fortuitous dream, launched by the poet into the world of recognizable and immortal forms, looks in that world for its ideal supports and affinities. It must find them or else be blown back among the ghosts. The highest ideality is the comprehension of the real. Poetry is not at its best when it depicts a further possible experience, but when it initiates us, by feigning something which as an experience is impossible, into the meaning of the experience which we have actually had.

—George Santayana, “The Elements and Function of Poetry,” Aesthetics and the Arts (McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1968), edited by Lee A. Jacobus