A Poet Reflects

“To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.”

—Akira Kurosawa

“Only he can be an artist who has a religion all his own—an original way of viewing infinity”

—Vincent van Gogh

Painting: Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1887.

“Everyone needs an identity of their own, not in relation to someone else… someone’s daughter, sister, wife, mother.  ‘Artist’ is mine alone.”

—Janet Badger

Image: Janet Badger, Primavera, (n.d.)

“The artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and … he does it without destroying something else.”

—John Updike, from Writers at Work (4th series, 1977).

“The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.”

—Federico García Lorca

“‘The way of the mystic and the way of the artist are related, except that the mystic doesn’t have a craft.’ The craft holds the artist to the world, whereas the mystic, facing inward, may be carried to such an extreme posture of indifference to the claims of phenomenal life as that of the old yogi … in the Hindu exemplary tale, ‘The Humbling of Indra.’”

—Joseph Campbell, from Chapter III, “The Way of Art,” in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (New World Library, 2002)

“The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and translate the passions which are its material.

—T. S. Eliot, from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in The Sacred Wood (Routledge, 1920)

“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

—James Joyce, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

“No great artist ever see things as they really are.  If he [or she] did, he [or she] would cease to be an artist.”  —Oscar Wilde

“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”

—Henry Ward Beecher, from Affirmations for Artists by Eric Maisel (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996).