Quotes from Wallace Fowlie

Art gives charm and beauty to terrible things. That is the power and its glory. It is hard for us to accept the truth that art is doom - a harsh doom for the artist who survives in his art but not as a living human.

The clown performs mute rites, as poetry always celebrates some willfully silenced voice.

The courage of his imagination is the temporal and spiritual measurement of every artist.

The poet makes himself into a visionary by a long derangement of all the senses.

He accepted the belief that the driving force behind the authentic artist is his self-isolation and even his self-immolation.

I no longer knew how to distinguish between the sweet light of tenderness and the blackness of sensuality

He was seeking power and the use of power through knowledge of sin, of intoxication, of poetry

One evening I pulled Beauty down on my knees. I found her embittered and I cursed her.

But the poet interprets and rushes to the cosmic expression of his vision, as the clown covers his manhood and disguises his tragedy.

In reading poetry, we learn to read either in the light of timelessness or in the light of social justice or injustice as experienced by once generation.

They know when they face the white paper for their real work that their unconscious mind is a lost continent which may give them flashes of wit and grossness and metaphorical beauty

These two forces of love, one selfish and self-seeking, the other charitable ( caritas ) and loving, continue to struggle with one another for domination in a man's soul.

The voyou is the man who escapes everything that normally holds back other men: studies, family, civic duties, religious practices. The voyou is the adventurer of space, of impassable roads, of the immense freedom of cities and fields.

Foe him, The Doors is the story of a young man who wants to break all the limits of life

Some artists attain to the cosmos of the spirit only by a practice of violence. They are artists who know hell and speak of it familiarly: Dante, Dostoievsky, Blake, Rimbaud, Henry Miler and Jim Morrison. The vocabulary used by these men opens up their passage through the flames. This is the violence of the spirit (not that of passion) in which the artist becomes the accuser of a wayward society.

Hast thou walked in the search of the depth?

that the work may be defined as the poem of a confession

The flights of Rimbaud are comparable to the ceaseless wanderings of the clown from village to village, and like the frantic gestures and somersaults of their performances.

On the homunculus the shadow of doom announced by Spengler and Lawrence falls more tragically than on the proud. Oswald Spengler, the prophet of cyclical history, D. H. Lawrence, the psychologist of love and sex, and Henry Miller, the visionary who perceives his wisdom in the microcosm of the heart, are all contained in the boy-prophet Arthur Rimbaud and in Jim Morrison, the rock singer who strives to "break on through to the other side".

at times expressing his conviction that literature and music were being absorbed by television, which was turning people into voyeurs.

Jim' persona had everything to do with the principle of Dionysus, the dark, self-defeating eroticism.

He watched his image in the fountain (the watery faces of his audience) over with Narcissus leans, eternally anxious, eternally enraptured