Herewith, comments on some aphorisms of Wallace Stevens from Adagia, aphorisms that sum up much of the aesthetic attitude I am concerned to oppose. (To be precise: I am out to oppose it in its imperialistic ambitions; I have nothing against art properly chastened and subordinated to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia.) I have bolded Wallace's lines.
If thought is an infection, then poetry is mental meltdown.
After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
What a paltry redemption! It would be better to say that there is no redemption than to say something as silly as this. Learn to live with the death of God, my friend! Don't insert a sorry substitute into the gap. Don't try to make a religion of what is only a dabbling in subjective impressions. Compare John Gardner, "Fiction is the only religion I have . . . ." (On Writers and Writing, p. xii.)
One has a sensibility range beyond which nothing really exists for one. And in each this is different.
Finally, something that makes sense and is true to boot.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Good advice for the would-be poet. But why be a poet? How justify this peculiar love that elevates words above people?
What we see in the mind is as real to us as what we see with the eye.
Except that what we see with the eye is also in the mind.
Poetry is a means of redemption.
Silliness repeated remains silly.
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
Excellent! A model aphorism.
The imagination is the romantic.
There is a glimmer of insight here, but you need to work on it some more.
Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions.
If the very being of things consists in their relations to other things, then there are no things — and no relations either.
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
This is sophomoric nonsense worse than the worst of Nietzsche. If I believe that p, it does not follow that p is true. But to believe that p is to believe that p is true. It is psychologically impossible to believe something one knows to be a fiction. And if all is fiction, then there are no truths or fictions, and talk of "exquisite truth" is empty verbiage.
Wine and music are not good until afternoon. But poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in solitude and in the times of solitude as, for example, in the earliest morning.
You are right about wine but not about music. The second sentence, however, is right on target.
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is tolerance itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
Because art is your religion, or is superior to religion.
The ideal is the actual become anaemic. The romantic is pretty much the same thing.
Nonsense. Much better is this: The ideal is the presently unattainable actual, the actual metaphysically Elsewhere and Elsewhen. The romantic is pretty much the same thing.
As the reason destroys, the poet must create.
Irrationalist rubbish. Say this instead: The playful fabrications of the poet offer welcome respite to the hard work of Reason as she labors to discern the truth.
The exquisite environment of fact. The final poem will be the poem of fact in the language of fact. But it will be the poem of fact not realized before.
A theist would be entitled to say this, but not you. Only God could overcome the poem/fact caesura.
It is the explanation of things that we make to ourselves that discloses our character.
Very good.
There is no difference between god and his temple.
I'll agree to this if you agree that there is no difference between you and your house.
In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
So imagination is not a mode of consciousness? Think harder.
Everything tends to become real; or everything moves in the direction of reality.
What about you? Are you more real than you used to be?
The poet looks at the world somewhat as a man looks at a woman.
It follows that the poet looks at the world in several mutually incompatible ways.
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Here is something worth thinking about.
Realism is a corruption of reality.
Look man, a good aphorism is not just some sophomorically clever verbiage! There has to be a clear thought, one that doesn't annihilate itself when one tries to think it.
The thing seen becomes the thing unseen. The opposite is, or seems to be, impossible.
The opposite of what? Don't you just love the qualification, "or seems to be. . ."?
The tongue is an eye.
The eye of the mouth, but rather myopic.
God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, as, for example, the form of high poetry.
Well, if "poetry is a means of redemption," then why not go whole hog and say this as well?
The great conquest is the conquest of reality. It is not to present life, for a moment, as it might have been.
Say what?
Reality is a vacuum.
But your thought is even more vacuous. And if "The ultimate value is reality," as you also say, then it follows that the ultimate value is a vacuum.
Poetry is metaphor.
Such profundity!
The word must be the thing it represents otherwise it is a symbol. It is a question of identity.
So 'Boston' = Boston on pain of being a symbol. It makes some sense to say that God's words are things, but God is dead for you. You should learn to live with that 'fact' and not try to step into God's shoes.
The body is the great poem.
So I am the poet of my body as poem. Great news! Today I give myself the body of a 2:30 marathoner.
In sum, there is only one excellent aphorism in the whole bunch: "Sentimentality is a failure of feeling." That is a gem!