Poiesis Quotes

“I could wish to spy the nakedness of their hearts, and through the different disguises of customs, climates, and religion, find out what is good in them, to fashion my own by. It is for this reason that I have not seen the Palais Royal - nor the facade of the Louvre - nor have attempted to swell the catalogues we have of pictures, statues, and churches - I conceive every fair being as a temple, and would rather enter in, and see the original drawings and loose sketches hung up in it, than the Transfiguration of Raphael itself.”
― Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

“La poesía ha perdido su vínculo con el lejano lector... Tiene que recobrarlo... Tiene que caminar en la oscuridad y encontrarse con el corazón del hombre, con los ojos de la mujer, con los desconocidos de las calles, de los que a cierta hora crepuscular, o en plena noche estrellada, necesitan aunque sea no más que un solo verso.... Esa visita a lo imprevisto vale todo lo andado, todo lo leído, todo lo aprendido... Hay que perderse entre los que no conocemos para que de pronto recojan lo nuestro de la calle, de la arena, de las hojas caídas mil años en el mismo bosque... y tomen tiernamente ese objeto que hicimos nosotros.... Sólo entonces seremos verdaderamente poetas... En ese objeto vivirá la poesía...”
― Pablo Neruda

“Everything that is responsible for creating something out of nothing is a kind of poetry; and so all the creations of every craft and profession are themselves a kind of poetry, and everyone who practices a craft is a poet.”
― Plato, Plato: Complete Works

“If there is one satisfactory mode, it is in the intermixture of art and criticism, of creativity and curiosity, which is the essential way to love and think such dense and rich human experience. It is the poetic attitude, shadowed closely by its critical child, which alone together sustain the species. The melancholics have forgotten or betrayed poiesis, limiting it the display of the unbearable.
Nevertheless, this bleakness about life, the inability to stand in the face of finitude's complexities that this reflects, betrays the species' fundamental quality of mimesis, of imagination as part of the answer to the human question. The consequences of this inability have been dire for intellectual life; it does not have confidence that imagination can, in the here and now, achieve an albeit always limited victory in struggle. Bleakness and weakness live in the allegorical, in the infinite deferral of hope over a utopian horizon. Committed to ruin, it cannot see or accept the hard truths of limit, love, and beauty. Therefore, it impoverishes the human, its capacities, and its challenges. It devalues its creations, their beauties, and their successes - simply because none of them is final, apocalyptic, erasure of the finitude that makes the secular world. It not only crystallizes the work of imagination in one key but condemns the imagination to the endless iteration of the same monotone. For the melancholics, bleakness is all.”
― Paul A. Bové, Love's Shadow