Quote#Time
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt…
Quote byJames Joyce · 1882–1941
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: "James Clarence Mangan" (1902), a lecture on Mangan delivered at the Literary and Historical Society, University College, Dublin (1 February 1902) and printed in the college magazine St. Stephen's.
English (original)
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.
— James Joyce
More from James Joyce
All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith …
Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are …
I want to achieve myself—little or great as I may be—for I know that there is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to my church as a human being, and accordingly I am going to Paris.
It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene
Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair? My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?