criticism
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good.
The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.
Wendell Berry
"Poetry," Thoreau said, "is nothing but healthy speech..." By which he meant, I suppose, speech that is not only healthy in itself, but conducive to the health of the speaker, giving him a true and vigorous relation to the world.
Jacques Barzun
The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.
And when will art cease to be something so exclusively for nice people?