William Sharp Quotes

“Fiona MacLeod provided a particular and peculiar atmosphere of twilit gloom, grim despair, and beauty laden with defeat. Despite the theatrical props and pretences, he was not making it all up, but articulating a genuine psychic affliction. The manner is both excessive and limiting - poetry which continually recreates a single mood by means of a litany of repeated words such as 'sorrow', 'beauty', 'grey', 'old', 'dream', 'pale' and 'sighing'. In one essay Fiona describes the Celtic spirit as a 'rapt pleasure in what is ancient and in the contemplation of what holds an indwelling melancholy; a visionary passion for beauty, which is of the immortal things beyond the temporary beauty of what is mutable and mortal...' Apart from the prose itself, which seems blown up with a bicycle pump, I'm nor sure if he knows what he means. What are these 'immortal things'? One sharp definition would destroy the misty fabric altogether.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction

“Fiona MacLeod! There will ever be a grain of bitterness in my acknowledgement of him, or of Yeats, or of any of the modern Celtic twilighters, an irritable impatience of their pale fancies, their posturing sonorities and follies. Yet on a certain side they are 'getting' me, and sometimes a phrase, a thought, has positively uncanny, mesmeric power over my very flesh.

This sort of dream poetry is clearly a drug, and of the most insidious... Then poetry casts its net, its iridescent net, and the silvery fish of intellect is meshed in the music of lost days and beauties forgone.”
― Neil M. Gunn, Half-Light