Status Updates From A Preface to Paradise Lost....

“This is the very portrait of a vocation: a thing that calls or beckons, that calls inexorably, yet you must strain your ears to catch the voice, that insists on being sought, yet refuses to be found.” P. 48

“To enjoy our full humanity we ought, so far as is possible, to contain within us potentially at all times, and on occasion to actualize, all the modes of feeling and thinking through which man has passed. You must, so far as in you lies, become an Achaean chief while reading Homer, a medieval knight while reading Malory, and an 18th century Londoner while reading Johnson.”

“The unchanging recurrence of [Homer’s] ‘wine-dark sea’, his ‘rosy-fingered dawn,’ his ships launched ‘into the holy brine,’ his ‘Poseidon shaker of earth,’ produce an effect which modern poetry, except where it has learned from Homer himself, cannot attain. They emphasize the unchanging human environment. They express a feeling very profound and very frequent in real life, but elsewhere

“The matter inside the poet *wants* the Form: in submitting to the Form it becomes really original… The attempt to be oneself often brings out only the more conscious and superficial parts of a man’s mind; working to produce a given kind of poem which will present a given theme as justly, delightfully, and lucidly as possible, he is more likely to bring out all that was really in him”