Spencer Heath's
Series
Spencer Heath Archive
Item 2140
Numerous poetic quotes penciled in a small, black pocket-size notebook containing dates 1935-1936
Original is in item 2139.
It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit.”
Emerson
Mere intellect alone is a tricky toy, a plaything of the mind; but beauty ravishes the soul and draws it upward. /This may be original with Heath; it wasn’t found in Wikiquote./
/Later in the same notebook, written in someone else’s hand, perhaps that of Jane Marcellus, 309 E. 21st, Brooklyn Bu2-4198, who put her information on the next page in very similar hand:/
Qui nolet fieri desidiosus, amet. (Whoso would not lose all his spirit, let him love.)
Emerson — The Poet
We are not porters and bearers, but children of the fire.
The fountains from whence all this river of time and its creations floweth are intrinsically ideal and beautiful.
He (poet) apprises us not of his wealth but of the commonwealth.
Beauty is the creator of the universe.
The dreams of the seers (poets) become the songs of the nations.
Poetry — science of the real.
Symbols emancipate and exhilarate.
We are touched as by a wand.
Poets are thus liberating gods.
Man a heavenly tree — roots upward
(Timeus affirms)
Whitman —
… to arouse and initiate more than to define or finish.
Eastman, Max — “It (poetry) is a property of alert and beating hearts.”
“To aspire forever towards the general type is — as even Plato in his world of thought acknowledged — a kind of death for the individual.” So far as man conforms he ceases to exist. “They (poets) make new paths at every turn.”
Fables — give voice to animals and inanimate things.
Myths — personify the good and evil forces and objects of nature as gods demons, giants, dwarfs, elves, trolls, gnomes, monsters etc.
Legends — based on acts and deeds of men.
W. J. Sly, World Stories Retold —
3/ Stories are the language of childhood.
4/ “Without a parable spake he not unto them.”
“We love the classics not because they are ancient but because they are true to life.”
Imagination
Creative imagination
C. B. Tinker — The Good Estate of Poetry: 1929
194/ Poetry awakens mad longings in the human heart for which the animal world affords no satisfaction.
195/ The wishes and dreams of mankind are themselves, in some profound and lasting way, an index of reality.
October 30, 1935
“Mythology — Dust of former beliefs”
Ed. Preface, Thomas Bullfinch, The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855)
Poetry the natural language of mythology ditto
William Blake,
“In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban
The mind-forged manacles I hear.”
Peace
“We take great pains to waylay and entrap that which of itself would fall into our hands.” Emerson
We are begirt with laws which execute themselves.
Emerson — Uses of Great Men, 3rd paragraph
“But enormous populations, if they be beggars /?/, are disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants, or of fleas — the more, the worse.”
“I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself.”
“We take great pains to waylay and entrap that which of itself will fall into our hands.”
“The true artist has the planet for his pedestal.”
The beauties and beneficences of Nature and of human nature are like princesses awaiting their destined human deliverers.
“Senates and sovereigns give no compliments and honors like the presenting of a worthy thought and presupposing its intelligent acceptance.”
“The imbecility of men is always inviting the imprudence of power.”
“My love is a hunger
a hopeless cry
For things that will
never be,
My love is the echo
of songs that die
My love is a memory.”
Homer C. House