reading to the limit

Once he believed he could read till he found the reason for all thing—read till it all fell in place.

classically defined

‘Classical qualities, classical form’ are easy words to say. What exactly do they mean? They imply an idea of excellence; they imply also clearness, sobriety, the art of composition; they mean, finally, that reason, rather than imagination and sensibility, presides over the execution of the work, and that the writer dominates his material.

—Jules Lemaître, “Guy De Maupassant,” Literary Impressions (Kennikat Press, 1971)

walk as prophecies

As {Wm.] James echoed Emerson, so Emerson was echoing the romantic poets. They too urged that men should walk as prophecies of the next age rather than in the fear of God or in the light of Reason. Shelley, in his “Defense of Poetry,” deliberately and explicitly enlarged the meaning of the term “poetry.” That word, he said, “may be defined to be ‘the expression of the Imagination.’” In this wider sense, he said, poetry is “connate with the origin of man.” It was, he went on to say, “the influence which is moved not, but moves.” It is “something divine…at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and the blossom of all other systems of thought.” Just as the Enlightenment had deified Reason, so Shelley and other romantics deified what I have been calling “The Imagination.”

—Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Poetry (U. of Virginia Press, 2017)

public and private

These two poles of outward and inward transformation are the Romantic extremes: Shelley's claim that the poets are unacknowledged legislators, Keats's cry, "oh for a life of pure sensation". Keats saw that Shelley's wish to vivify the language of noble reason, so that it would incite men to make a just world, could lead only to the surrender of hidden poetic gardens to public planners; Keats wrote poems like arbors, in which readers were invited to spend a lifetime eating imaginary nectarines from imaginary dishes.

—Stephen Spender, "Inside the Cage: Reflections on conditioned and unconditioned imagination," The Making Of A Poem (Norton, 1962)

poet within the poet

What is probably new and startling in the work of Dylan Thomas is that, in dragging into light his versions of “the hidden causes” which he mentions, he has given an articulate voice to other parts of the body than the romantic heart—to the glands and the nerves, that is—and has, in considerable measure, freed them from the poetically sterile reason.
[…]
Although he is suitably interested in most phases of life, his impulse comes primarily from within his own body. He is the poet within the poet, and is generally dependent upon no externalities for his subject. This, then, I would say, is one of his main contributions to poetry: he has given voices and eyes to the part of the being which had formerly been dumb and blind; he has given the body a poetic aura…

—Henry Treece, Dylan Thomas: Dog Among the Fairies (Lindsay Drummond Ltd., 1949)

wave line

The poetic line lifts, rolls and crashes upon reason’s rocks.