'...What I really feel is that, in my blundering chaotic way, I am nearer to the great fermenting vats of the elemental world than these curled darlings of wilful fancy. It is, I suppose, this rude earthy realism in my composition that makes it so hard for me to appreciate the elaborate overtones and rhythmic suggestions of the Futurist and Cubist schools of painting.
Post-Impressionism, on the contrary, I love and admire; and hold it a great and invaluable experiment in the history of Art. This is because Post-Impressionism has a fine barbaric sense of the splendid magic of the surface of things - that surface of things where I habitually live; whereas those others go digging away at what to me are profoundly uninteresting "Mathematical Harmonies" of a very doubtful "World-Beneath."
As to what is called Free Verse, I am quite friendly to it, as long as it deals, in realistic bitterness and earthly tang, with the essential ironies and insults of Fate's common ways with her mortal children. It is when it launches out into mystical abstruseness, and recondite occultism, into symbolic mythology and images drawn from fairy-land, that I detest and despise it.'
from Confessions by John Cowper Powys (Chapter IX), in Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment