predictable results

The use of unusual and novel poetic forms will produce obscure and ignorable poems.

obscure in their own way

The authors I most love are obscure in different senses of that word.

quote from the blue

With quoted entries ranging from the obscure to the random, it was an ‘uncommonplace book’.

obscure worlds

As print litmags, always obscure, fade into archives, the online litmags blot out cyberspace.

obscure grasping

The poetry that comes into being as a result of the working of the creative intuition upon poetic knowledge therefore reveals both an “obscure grasping of the real” and “an obscure grasping of the soul of the poet.” Maritain calls the former the “direct” sign of a poetic act and the latter a “reverse” sign of the same act. Both signs are inextricably involved in the making of a poem.

For if at the source of the poetic act there is the experience which I have tried to describe, in which the obscure grasping of the real, resounding in the creative subjectivity, is at the same time an obscure grasping of the soul of the poet, it will be necessary that the work be made a manifestation of both at once. This work is an object, and must always maintain its consistency and its proper value as an object, and at the same time it is a sign, at once a “direct” sign of the secrets perceived in things, of their avowal, of some irrecusable verity of their nature or history, transpierced by the creative intuition, and a “reverse” sign of the substance of the poet in the art of spiritual communication and revealing itself to itself. [Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, The Situation of Poetry(Philosophical Library, 1955), p 84]

Samuel Hazo, The World within the Word: Maritain and the Poet (Franciscan U. Press, 2018)

JF: I wanted to like the book more than I did. So much muzzy metaphysics in Maritain’s poetics. Ample amounts of Maritain are quoted, full of abstract words and concepts, presented as though self-evident, but Maritain offers almost no textual evidence to buttress his assertions. Hazo provides many quotes from other authors to try to underpin Maritain’s bold but unfounded ideas. I give Hazo credit for linking Keats and Hopkins to some of Maritain’s ideas. However, the two poets, and their notions of ‘poetics’, prove to be more relevant to the creative process than any of Maritain’s grand notions.   

low profile

Among the approved occupations after being put into witness protection is being a poet.

under the hull

Reading a beautiful but obscure poem, like gliding over a shimmery surface trying to read the weeds swaying in the currents below.

hard case

The poem was not obscure, it was obdurate; made of poetic material impervious to casual reading.

deftly alluded to

To touch in those allusions that will color and enhance rather than cloud and obscure the passages.

obscure, original, or quaint

His rhapsodies are but rough notes—the stenographic memoranda of poems—memoranda which, because they were not all-sufficient for his own intelligence, he cared not to be at the trouble of writing out in full for mankind. In all his work we find no conception thoroughly wrought. For this reason he is the most fatiguing of poets. Yet he wearies in saying too little rather than too much. What, in him, seems the diffuseness of one idea, is the conglomerate concision of many: and this species of concision it is, which renders him obscure. With such a man, to imitate was out of the question. It would have served no purpose; for he spoke to his own spirit alone, which would have comprehended no alien tongue. Thus he was profoundly original. His quaintness arose from intuitive perception of that truth to which Bacon alone has given distinct utterance—“There is no exquisite Beauty which has not some strangeness in its proportions.” But whether obscure, original, or quaint, Shelley had no affectations. He was at all times sincere.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “Shelley and the Poetic Abandon,” The Unknown Poe (City Lights Books, 1980)

not obscure but a blur

[Browning] is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realize with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and forward as it lives along the animated line of its labor, springs from thread to thread and darts from centre to circumference of the glittering and quivering web of living thought woven from the inexhaustible stores of his perception and kindled from the inexhaustible fire of his imagination. He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man’s as the speed of a railway to that of a wagon or the speed of a telegraph to that of a railway It is hopeless to enjoy the charm or to apprehend the gist of his writing except with a mind thoroughly alert, an attention awake to all points, a spirit open and ready to be kindled by the contact…


—Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Browning’s obscurity,” 1875, reprinted Swinburne as Critic edited by Clyde K. Hyder (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972)

out of the animal darkness

While excavating archaeological sites in Egypt, some of the few remaining fragments of Sappho’s poetry we have were discovered as stuffing inside a mummified crocodile. Isn’t that an apt analogy for where all poems come from, arising by chance from an obscure animal darkness?

It's Chinatown

Sometimes when faced with difficult or complex poetry, the detective’s words to Jake Gittes at the end of the movie Chinatown come to mind: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."