Quoted

Today's quote is unrelated to children's literature. On second thought, maybe it isn't. At any rate, the words come from the poet James Wright, in a letter to a friend (1950), and appear in A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright, edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

You asked about my work...Perhaps the most acute of artistic problems is the emergence from one's self. T.S. Eliot observed that, for the artist, art seeks to escape from personality. He meant that an audience is more interested in your insight into the nature of truth among men and objects, and your most objective creations, than in your allergy to headcolds, your taste for green neckties, or your liking for beer...My problem has always been how to get out of myself—perhaps how to most effectively project myself beyond the limits of my many pettinesses.

Don't miss Wright's poem "A Blessing" online at the Academy of American Poets: www.poets.org.

Comments

[Michele Fry]

I'm pretty sure it's not a generic truth any longer that the audience is "more interested in your insight into the nature of truth among men and objects, and your most objective creations, than in your allergy to headcolds, your taste for green neckties, or your liking for beer...". I'd say that the cult of celebrity is so strong that the majority of the audience IS interested in beer consumption, tie preferences, allergies, and all the minutiae of the life of a "celebrity".

[Susan]

Good point about celebrity. But it surely the quote was about Wright's truth, I'd think. Sounds like an old-fashioned idea these days, doesn't it, Michele?

I laughed when I first read it (although it's not really a humorous quotation, per se) because I thought that James Wright does not sound like a blogger. On the other hand, the collection of this poet's letters could almost be seen as blog-like; in them, he flushes out many ideas about his poetry and about literature in general. These days people often use blogs for a similar purpose.

And, despite what he says in the quoted passage, he seems to be always talking about himself no matter whom he is writing to.

"Many Pettinesses" would be a good name for a blog!

[Susan]

P.S., a little context about James Wright: he was a student at Kenyon College about the time this letter was written. His teacher was John Crowe Ransom, one of the leading New Criticism proponents. (Much earlier, at Vanderbilt University, Ransom had taught Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, et al.)