This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.
Poetry |
Thick white cloud of moths crazy swirls around the dull lights and on the parapets lays down a blanket on which scricchia like sugar on the footÂ… and the water continues to gnaw the banks and more no one is innocent.
Poetry |
From the Tower falls the sound of bronze: the show goes on between drums argue that the glory of the districts.
Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.
I do not know how exhausted you resist | in this lake indifference LORD thy heart; maybe you save an amulet that you keep close your lipstick, to down, to file: a white rat,d 'ivory, and so exist!
There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
Poetry |
Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion.
Oh, say, how call ye this, To face, and smile, the comrade whom his kiss Betrayed? Scorn? Insult? Courage? None of these: 'tis but of all man's inward sicknesses the vilest, that he knoweth not of shame nor pity! Yet I praise him that he came . . . to me it shall bring comfort, once to clear my heart on thee, and thou shalt wince to hear.
Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.
Poetry |
Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that The rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers.
Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
No one knows, at sight a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, there's nothing in it. Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me: Don't kick against the pricks, accept opinion. The Nineties tried your game and died, there's nothing in it.
Convention | Good | Poetry |
There is a city to be built, the plan of which we carry in our heads, in our hearts. Countless generations have already toiled at the building of it. The effort to aid in completing it, with us, takes the place of prayer. In this sense we say, "Laborare est orare."
Daring | Life | Life | Man | Men | Present | Righteousness | Search | Theories | Thinkers | Thought | Time | Truth | Unity | Will | Woman | World | Youth | Youth | Learn | Thought |
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
He is not half through yet, and to what he will come in the end not even Elrond can foretell. Not to evil, I think. He may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can.