The Saunterer

E. M. Forster on the benefit of poetry

On April 1, 1942, E. M. Forster gave a radio talk about poetry, explaining:

I believe in poetry because it is a special human product, for which no substitute has yet been found. It employs rhythm - a rhythm more regular than that of prose and nearer to the dance - and it sometimes employs rhyme and assonance. Rhythm, rhyme and assonance are not in themselves remarkable devices - anyone can work them - but they may release intensities and delicacies of the human mind of which we shouldn’t otherwise be aware. That, condensed into a single sentence is my defence of poetry. (Quoted from page 177 of The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster 1929 - 1960, edited by M. Lago, L. K. Hughes, and E. M. Walls. 2008. University of Missouri Press.)
For a brief biography of E. M. Forster, click here.

Simone Weil on beauty and God

    The Saunterer is a pantheist, feeling a connection between the beauty of wild nature and the forces that created it - a god, for lack of a better word. Simone Weil goes one step higher (lower in a pantheist’s view) to a connection between beauty in anything and a Creator, the God of religion:   

In everything which gives us the pure authentic feeling of beauty there is really the presence of God. There is, as it were, an incarnation of God in the world, and it is indicated by beauty.
    The beauty is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.
    Hence all art of the highest order is religious in essence. (That is what people have forgotten today.) A Gregorian melody is as powerful a witness as the death of a martyr. (Quoted from The Simone Weil Reader, by George A. Panichas. New York: Moyer Bell Limited. 1977. p. 379.)

    For a brief biography of Simone Weil, click here.

Franz Marc on heightening one’s feeling for nature

  Franz Marc was a German painter who explained himself this way:

I am trying to heighten my feeling for the organic rhythm in all things, trying to establish a pantheistic contact with the tremor and flow of blood in nature, in animals, in the air. . . . (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. C. Romesburg, p. 248.)

    To make his remark come alive by seeing some of his paintings, click here. And for a brief biography of Franz Marc, click here.