Laura Riding

“Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”

“Public interference with poetry rests on the popular delusion that an immediate commerce exists between historical truth and poetic truth; that the historical universe is potentially the poetic universe. The historical universe is, however, only a temporary aggregate of ideas. These ideas may direct the structure of the literary universe, which produces the philosophical journalism of a period; the structure of the poetic universe is directed by a person in single-handed conflict with the time-community. Science, the present-day aggregate of tribal ideas, puts on the creative mind a social compulsion to accept these ideas; and criticism acts, as usual, as the nattered instrument of conversion. Official literature is born of a critical rather than of a literary sense; it is the social institution which the [professionalized] poet is hired to serve.”

“What is beheld through glass seems glass. The quality of what I am Encases what I am not, Smoothes the strange world. I perceive it slowly, In my time, In my material, As my pride, As my possession: The vision is love. When life crashes like a cracked pane, Still shall I love Even the strange dead as the living once. Death also sees, though distantly, And I must trust then as now A prism — of another kind, Through which one may not put one's hands or touch.”