Quotes from William Everson

The historic transition from Novice to Proficient to Adept was said to be accomplished virtually overnight by the progression from marijuana to peyote to lysergic acid. Instant mysticism had arrived. Before the court of law, hippies demanded freedom for LSD the way early Christians demanded freedom for the Eucharist.

Art is not the handmaid of politics. It is its own remedy! And its healing is sacral.

Poetry, like sanctity, is the orchestration of multiple attributes into vast, compelling wholes.

A poem is contained movement.

One of the deepest needs of the human soul is for centeredness . . . which confers meaning on the shapelessness of temporal existence.

To live one's myth is to think in its terms. To fulfill one's myth is to suffer through its source.

For the mind of every man is balanced upon the creative tension within him of conceptual mediation between the opposed polarities of the finite and the infinite, the essential and the existential. the exact equation between them is responsible for the basic human types, which, in aesthetics, constitute the classical and the romantic temperaments.

Nietzsche: 'myth itself is a kind or style of thinking . It imparts an idea of the universe, but does it in the sequence of events, actions, sufferings.

Heinrich Zimmer: 'Myth is the sole and spontaneous image of life itself in its flowing harmony and mutually hostile contrarieties, in all the polyphony and harmony of their contradictions.

Then all meaning was in the group . . . today . . . all is in the individual.

The anthropocentric version of the God of Christianity will not avail. . . . Instead emerges a new hero, a new messiah, a new superman. He will seek to weld all together in a terrible act of unbelievable affirmation beyond the limits of common human desire, beyond common hope. He will free himself through the ancient acts of violation — fornication, incest, rape. . . . His name is the Rev. Dr. Arthur Barclay.

It is in the order of the imagination, the order of poetry, that the possible exceeds itself, is sanctified in excess.