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Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry QUOTES

Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry QUOTES

1 " if you wish to serve God or man, if in general you wish to serve, to work for the good, then join the Salvation Army or something of that sort – and give up poetry. "

― Marina Tsvetaeva , Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry

2 " A shoe's material - leather - is calculable and finite. work of art's material (not sound, not word, not stone, not canvas, but spirit) is incalculable and infinite. There are no shoes once for always. Every last line of Sappho is once for always. This is why (calculability of material) boots held by the bootmaker are in better hands than are poems in the hand of the critic. There are no misunderstood boots, but how many misunderstood poems! "

― Marina Tsvetaeva , Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry

3 " A poet's marriage to his time is a forced marriage. A marriage of which - as of any suffered violence - he is ashamed, and from which he tries to tear loose. Poets of the past tear into the past, those of the present into the future, as if time were less time for not being my own! All Soviet poetry is a stake on the future. Solely Mayakovsky, this zealot of his own conscience, this convict of the present day, came to love this present day; overcame, that is, the poet in himself. "

― Marina Tsvetaeva , Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry

4 " - Why are your poems so different from one another?
- Because the years are different. "

― Marina Tsvetaeva , Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry

5 " To gladden the reader with attractive interweavings of language is not the purpose of creative work. My purpose, when I sit down to a work, is not to gladden anybody, either myself or any other, but to make that work as perfect as possible. Gladness afterwards, when it’s done. … Gladness afterwards – and a lot of it. But a lot of tiredness too. This tiredness of mine when the work is finished is something I honour. It means that there was something to overcome and that the work did not come to me without cost. It means it was worthwhile waging the battle. That same tiredness I honour in the reader. If he is tired from my work, it means he has read well, and read something good. The reader’s tiredness is not devastating, but creative. Co-creative. It does honour to both the reader and me. "

― Marina Tsvetaeva , Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry