Vernon Lee Quotes

Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

The whole idea of a dream, to me, is a mystery plane. Things are operating there that tell us the real truth. The stuff going on inside us that we don't express or even know about pours out in our dreams.

Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.

This dull river has a deep religion of its own; so, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though, perhaps, unconsciously.

Painters... are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds.

...the best figurative poetry speaks not to the frivolous intellect, but (if anything does) straight to the heart; and does it better than plain prose. There seems then to be something which is better said with metaphor than without, which goes straighter to its mark by going crooked, and hits its aim exactly by flying off at tangents.

The unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.

Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

The summit sings what is being spoken in the depths.

What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that is has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.

Obviously, we suppress things, emotions, things during the day - thoughts that we obviously haven't thought through enough, and in that state of sleep when our subconscious, or mind just sort of randomly fires off different surreal story structures, and when we wake up we should pay attention to these things.

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not — which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.

I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.

The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.

I think tension between the intimate and the vast is at the heart of every poem by any poet, though of course the terms with which it is explored vary. Perhaps it is something we seek out in order to affirm that our small lives are tethered to something large and ongoing.

Into the day as by dream I swim to the music of nourished meaning.

poetry ... is another way to be hurled straight into the heart of God.

Deep meaning lies often in childish play.

But . . . I may as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.