True poetry is recognized by the depth of emotion it communicates, by the force of its deep-set tide, by its intuitive metaphysics.
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, prior and posterior to culture.
The duty of the poet is to examine not the individual, but the species; to observe general properties and comprehensive phenomena; he does not count how many stripes a tulip flower has, nor describe the different shades in the green color of the forest... He must also depict, when he paints nature, those prominent and striking features which bring the original to everyone's mind...
The poet must set aside minute distinctions (which one man may have noticed, but another did not) in favor of those characteristics which are equally obvious to the careful observer and to the one who looks in a only
There is a general rule in poetry, which requires that all close terms of art should melt into the general impression, because poetry must speak a universal language.
The poet who wants to escape from society, who thinks he is above the "scum", who wants to make art for art's sake, is a prisoner of an illusion...
Art is not a natural fact, but the reproduction, mimesis imitation, of a natural fact, consequently, an artificial fact. Thus, art is a specifically human manifestation.
The people themselves, through the efforts of many generations, complete their own profile, but the great artists elevate the characteristics of the respective people to universality. The works of great artists are organically incorporated into this profile.
It is impossible to defend yourself definitively and materially, physically, against death. But if no one can evade it, at least the ideal domination of death is permitted, entrusting to the memory of men - and in a form rising to universality - the gestures and thoughts of mortals. To raise one's own self above the contingency and banality of everyday life, to raise one's own individuality to the splendor of universality, and then to perpetuate itself over successive generations, to impose itself on memory - this is what art ultimately tends towards. To overcome the contingent singular, to transform it into the persistent universal, aere perennius.
Unable to encompass his immortality as an individual, the man-artist acquires it by participating in the universality of the genre. Unable to gain immortality in extension, he acquires it in intensity.
Art is also a form of knowledge. It makes up for the structural defects of the intellect. Its raison d'être is to make us sensitive and present the essence of things through the image.
Any history of an art should itself be a work of art.
The artist's personality, at first a scream or a cadence or a certain atmosphere, then a flowing narrative... until... it remains within or behind or beyond or above his work, unseen, thinned to nothingness.
You can't find poetry anywhere, when you don't carry it inside you.
The art of versification tells the poet what he must do as an artist; but the poet, precisely because he is a poet, doesn't he have other obligations? Does he cease to be a man... a member of society. And son of the country? Can he say to himself: I will destroy all my other relationships, maybe I will be only a poet? And if he cannot annihilate these relations, can he neglect the obligations necessarily connected with them? And what reader will want to discover in the poet this arbitrary rupture with himself?...
Each reader, being the critic of the poet, is also the judge of the man, and woe to the poet, if the assent of the judge will not be as significant for him as that of the critic!
Art is innate in the artist as an instinct that takes possession of him and makes man his instrument.
Writing is a kind of exorcism.
Every work of art is a document, a testimony.
Poetry is nothing but an expedition in search of truth.
To act on life, theater must be stronger, more intense than life.
The beautiful is the symbol of the moral Good, and ... in this aspect alone ... it gives pleasure, demanding the assent of all the other elements. By this the spirit becomes aware of a certain ennobling rise above mere sensitivity to the pleasures received through the senses.
We need poets to remind us of the ideal.
Poetry:... transfiguring life by explaining it.
Great writers have always been openers of wide horizons for their peoples and for humanity, they have always carried aloft the torch that illuminates the way nations must go.
Art defeats the ugly without avoiding its path.
The essence of poetry consists in the fact that it, with the help of language, shows a certain number of objects, which we know or whose existence we suspect, looking at them from the perspective that engages the choicest powers of our soul, to such an extent that so high that hatred acts on the other and thus sets the whole soul in motion...
The deepest secrets of poetry lie in the fact that it sets our soul into action. Indeed, action is the essential condition of our pleasure. Common poets want us to vegetate together with them.
Arts and literature, the expressions of intelligence, have no hope of life except where they derive their origin from the very stock of peoples. Otherwise they are nothing but exotic plants, which the first wind either freezes or dries them. In order to have national arts and literature, they must be connected with society, with beliefs, with customs, in a word, with our history...
To be a poet it is not enough to know how to assemble beautifully rhyming images around a good "background"... Poetic work... is much harder. Apart from the talent that no one can give you, apart from the nature alone and the circumstances of the life in which you grow up - regardless of your will, one more thing is required: culture.