apart from process

I know he wrote a lot of poetry, but did he write any poems? There being a difference.

precise and reticent

Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us.

—Wei T'ai, Poems of the Late Tang (NYRB Classics, 2008), A. C. Graham, translator.

what is was

What it was as art, was not immediately evident.

untouched by any other

An image so whole and complete unto itself, that it would forever ignore the attraction of metaphor.

wide-eyed

Poetic image: That thing which would go unnoticed except to an untrained eye.

strange terms

Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find
Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing;
Yet worth of thine and the expected joy
Of thy sweet friendship do persuade me on
To bear all toil and wake the clear nights through,
Seeking with what of words and what of song
I may at last most gloriously uncloud
For thee the light beyond, wherewith to view
The core of being at the centre hid.

—Titus Lucretius Carus, “Of The Nature Of Things”
(translation by Wm. Ellery Leonard)

the bird, the flower, the tree

Intuition can only operate by an immediate contact with the thing. In poetry what in logic are called subjective and objective are united. There is no observer and thing observed, both are one; the poet is the bird, the flower, the tree, the Pope (Browning in “The Ring and the Book”), the ship (Coleridge in “The Ancient Mariner”), and anything else to which he is able to join himself. And if this union does not take place there can be no poetry.

—Michael Oakeshott, “Philosophy, Poetry and Reality”, What is History? (Imprint Academic, 2004)

home appliance rescues poem

When confronted with a particularly abstract meditation, I want to say to the poet, “What this poem needs is a toaster.”