Quote of the Day (Leonard Cohen, on His Desired Audience)

“I want an audience of inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists, French-Canadian intellectuals, unpublished writers, curious musicians etc., all that holy following of my Art.”—Canadian poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), to his publisher in 1960, quoted in Ira Nadel, Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (2007)

Quote of the Day (Wallace Stevens, on the ‘Spiritual Role of the Poet’)

“My own way out toward the future involves a confidence in the spiritual role of the poet, who will somehow have to assist the painter, etc. (any artist, to tell the truth) in restoring to the imagination what it is losing at such a catastrophic pace.”— American modernist poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), letter to Henry Church, June 1, 1939, in Letters of Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens (1966)

Quote of the Day (Donald Hall, on Why Fans Love Baseball)

“For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.”—U.S. poet-essayist Donald Hall (1928-2018), Fathers Playing Catch with Sons: Essays on Sport (Mostly Baseball) (1985)

Hall, the onetime poet laureate of the U.S. who died earlier this week, was a lifelong fan of the Boston Red Sox. Longtime readers of this blog know that I am not a fan of that team. 

Still, when it comes to a game that “seizes and retains the past,” few figures are so emblematic of baseball at its best than Bosox legend Ted Williams, pictured here. Moreover, in addition to being a hitter virtually without a peer, before or since, Williams was an American hero who flew 39 combat missions as a Marine fighter pilot in the Korean War. Between that conflict and World War II, he would sacrifice nearly four seasons at the height of his career to serve his country.

Williams and Hall are well worth celebrating and remembering this week.

Quote of the Day (Gerard Manley Hopkins, on Violence, Insolence and Pride)

“Violence is admired and, above all, insolence and pride. But it is our baseness to admire anything evil. It seems to me we should in everything side with virtue, even if we do not feel its charm." —English Jesuit and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), letter to English poet-critic Coventry Patmore, Sept. 12, 1883, in A Hopkins Reader, selected by John Pick (1953)

Quote of the Day (Anne Bradstreet, on Winter and Adversity)

“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.” —American Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), “Meditations Divine and Moral” (1655)

The accompanying picture was taken in my hometown, Englewood, NJ, almost exactly a year ago, when snow was still on the ground on the first day of spring.

Quote of the Day (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Asking for Good Advice)

“I feel that I am exceeding the speed limit. But I seldom skid, and when I do there is very little splash. Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.” —Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), in a February 1913 letter to her mother and sisters, quoted in Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960 (2007)

Quote of the Day (E.E. Cummings, on Why ‘Nobody Else Can Be Alive for You’)

"Remember one thing only: that it's you—nobody else—who determines your destiny and decides your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else. Toms can be Dicks and Dicks can be Harrys, but none of them can ever be you. "— American poet E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), I: Six Nonlectures (1953)