If I had grown in some generous place —
if my hours had opened in ease —
I would make You a lavish banquet.
My hands wouldn’t clutch at You like this,
so needy and tight.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours I, 21

This laboring of ours with all that remains undone,
as if still bound to it,
is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying — releasing ourselves
from the very ground on which we stood —
is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,
and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,
as wave follows wave,
while he, now wholly serene and sure,
with regal composure,
allows himself to glide.

— Rilke, New Poems

Some of us have long felt continuities that have little in common with the course of history. We understand what is most distinctive in this fateful moment and what future it holds. But we, squeezed between yesterday and tomorrow, will we be mindful and receptive enough to participate in the unfolding of the larger movement?

— Rilke, Letter to Countess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe
July 9, 1915

This research had long entered the charmed stage when the quest overrides the goal, and a new organism is formed, the parasite so to speak of the ripening fruit. Pnin averted his mental gaze from the end of his work, which was so clearly in sight that one could make out the rocket of an asterisk, the flare of a “sic!” This line of land was to be shunned as the doom of everything that determined the rapture of endless approximation. . . . [T]he spine thrill of a felicitous guess; and all the innumerable triumphs of bezkorïstnïy (disinterested, devoted) scholarship — this had corrupted Pnin, this had made him a happy, footnote-drugged maniac who disturbs the book mites in a dull volume, a foot thick, to find in it a reference to an even duller one.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

We have no reason to distrust our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has an abyss, it is ours. If dangers are there, we must try to love them. And if we would live with faith in the value of what is challenging, then what now appears to us as most alien will become our truest, most trustworthy friend. Let us not forget the ancient myths at the outset of humanity’s journey, the myths about dragons that at the last moment transform into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act just once with beauty and courage. Perhaps every terror is, in its deepest essence, something that needs our recognition or help.

— Rilke, Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet

A small piece of earth, burned,
as if burned by the sun’s fire.
The touch of a girl’s hand
seems somehow still upon it.
Feel how it remained there,
not longing for anything other,
just resting into itself
like fingers on a chin.

We take up this figure, then that,
turning them in the light.
We can almost understand
how they managed to survive.
We need only smile
and accept more fully
what it offers to our eyes.

— Rilke, New Poems

I think that poetry at its greatest — in Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Blake — has one broad and essential difficulty: it is the true mode of expanding our consciousness. This it accomplishes by what I have learned to call strangeness. Owen Barfield was one of several critics to bring forth strangeness as a poetic criterion. For him, as for Walter Pater before him, the Romantic added strangeness to beauty: Wallace Stevens, a part of this tradition, has a Paterian figure cry out: “And there I found myself more truly and more strange.” Barfield says: “It must be a strangeness of meaning,” and then makes a fine distinction:

It is not correlative with wonder; for wonder is our reaction to things which we are conscious of not quite understanding, or at any rate of understanding less than we had thought. The element of strangeness in beauty has the contrary effect. It arises from contact with a different kind of consciousness from our own, different, yet not so remote that we cannot partly share it, as indeed, in such a connection, the mere word “contact” implies. Strangeness, in fact, arouses wonder when we do not understand: aesthetic imagination when we do.

Consciousness is the central theme here. As Barfield intimates, consciousness is to poetry what marble is to sculpture: the material that is being worked. Words are figurations of consciousness: metaphorical of consciousness, the poet’s words invite us to share in a strangeness. “A felt change in consciousness” is one of Barfield’s definitions of the poetic effect, and I relate this to what fascinates me most in the greatest Shakespearean characters — Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Lear, Cleopatra — the extraordinary changes that come about when they overhear themselves. As James Wood remarks, actually they become conscious of listening to Shakespeare, because in overhearing themselves, what they are hearing is Shakespeare. They become themselves more truly and more strange, because they are “free artists of themselves” (Hegel’s tribute to them).

The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves. Even Shakespeare cannot make me into Falstaff or Hamlet, but all great poetry asks us to be possessed by it. To possess it by memory is a start, and to augment our consciousness is the goal. The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.

— Harold Bloom, The Art of Reading Poetry

So I crossed my eyes with my eyes closed. And I saw something in the dark: two crescent moons on the outside of my vision, which were the new moons of strain. I could feel my corneal pleasure domes moving, too. And as my eyes reached maximum crossing I felt an interesting blind pain of wrongness. I decided that I should hold on to that.

— Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

A man speaking English beautifully chooses to speak in French, which he speaks with greater difficulty, so that he is obliged to choose his words carefully, forced to give up fluency and to find the hard words that come with difficulty, and then after all that finding he puts it all back into English, a new English containing all the difficulty of the French, of the coining of thought in a second language, a new English with the power to change English forever. This is Samuel Beckett. This is his great work. It is the thing that speaks. Surrender.

— Salman Rushdie

Only what is within you is near; all else is far.
And this within: so packed and pressured,
barely contained, unsayable.
The island could be a star so insignificant

that space in its terrible blackness takes no note
and mindlessly destroys it.
Thus, unillumined and unheard,
expecting nothing

but that all this may yet come to an end,
it continues doggedly its self-invented course,
alone, outside the patterns made
by planets and the suns they orbit.

— Rilke, New Poems

Maybe my theory of meter will be helpful to people. It turns out that helping is the main thing. If you feel that you have a use, if you think that your writing furthers life or truth in some way, then you keep writing. But if that feeling stops, you have to find something else to do. Or die, I guess. Or mow the lawn, or go somewhere and do something, like visit a historic house, or clean up a room, or teach people something that you think is worth knowing.

— Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

As if lying in some crater on the moon,
each farm is encircled by its earthen banks.
And like orphans the gardens inside
are dressed and combed the same

by the storm that raises them so roughly,
scaring them all the time with threats of death.
That’s when you stay indoors, gazing into
the crooked mirror at the assorted things

reflected there. Toward evening one of you
steps outside the door and draws from the harmonica
a sound as soft as weeping

such as you heard once in a distant port.
Out there, silhouetted against the sky,
one of the sheep stands motionless on the far dike.

— Rilke, New Poems

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit
……..in which they are won.

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 18

This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 24

If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world.

— Robert Kaplan