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"Art is the language of the human being. It is the language of that being, who, before being himself in the multiplicity of things or allowing himself to be absorbed by countless activities that give us the illusion of living intensely, has the capacity for wonder." Wonder, and the poetry that arises from its purpose, is for that which does not pass away. . . . Of the things of this world, only two remain, two alone: poetry and goodness, and nothing else. . . . That which is beautiful is not that what pleases today or has pleased but what should please; just as what is good is not what gives the most pleasure but what makes us better. Artist: the torrent of beauty flows through you, but you are not beauty.   Those who know how to suffer lives from vision and silence. Desire leads us to live paschally.   Beauty is mercy. —Stanislaw Grygiel

God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love , except to give them endless duration . After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the plenitude of man. You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman. Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial , an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny . This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive . The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, ho...

Men and Saints Charles Peguy  GOD SPEAKS : When you love someone, you love him as he is. I alone am perfect. It is probably for that reason That I know what perfection is And that I demand less perfection of those poor people. I know how difficult it is. And how often, when they are struggling in their trials, How often do I wish and am I tempted to put my hand under their stomachs In order to hold them up with my big hand Just like a father teaching his son how to swim In the current of the river And who is divided between two ways of thinking. For on the one hand, if he holds him up all the time and if he holds him too much, The child will depend on this and will never learn how to swim. But if he doesn't hold him up just at the right moment That child is bound to swallow more water than is healthy for him. In the same way, when I teach them how to swim amid their trials I too am divided by two ways of thinking. Because if I ...

How To Be a Poet (to remind myself) i Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment. ii Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. iii Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. © Wendell Berry . Counterpoint Press.

Canti Giacomo Leopardi     The Victories of Love and Other Poems Coventry Patmore 

Babycakes Armistead Maupin The Night Listener Armistead Maupin  Tea Time for the Traditionally Built Alexander McCall Smith  Dear Life Alice Munro  The Victories of Love and Other Poems Coventry Patmore  Stories of the Old South Patrick Samway  Girl With Curious Hair David Foster Wallace  

The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni Inferno by Dante Alighieri  Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri  Paradiso by Dante Alighieri  Vita Nuova by Dante

The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables by Robert Henryson Introduction [by translator, Seamus Heaney] Little enough is known about Robert Henryson, ‘a schoolmaster of Dunfermline ’ and master poet in the Scots language: born perhaps in the 1420s, he was dead by 1505, the year his younger contemporary William Dunbar mourned his passing in ‘Lament for the Makars.’ In a couplet where the rhyme tolls very sweetly and solemnly, Dunbar says that death ‘In Dunfermelyne…has done roun [whispered]/ To Maister Robert Henrisoun’, although here the title ‘Maister’ has more to do with the deceased man’s status as a university graduate than with his profession as a teacher or his reputation as the author of three major narrative poems— The Testament of Cresseid , The Moral Fables and Orpheus and Eurydice —as well as a number of shorter lyrics including the incomparable (and probably untranslatable) ‘Robyn and Makene’.           The hon...

Democracy in America Vol 1 by Alexis de Tocqueville   Local History and the Library by J. L. Hobbs The Cathedral by J. K. Huysmans The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture Ward by John William The Discovery of Poetry by Frances Mayes Reforming Education Mortimer Adler Teacher in America by Jacques Barzun The Book of Ages by J. F. Bierline The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling  Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians Quality with Soul by Robert Benne 

  W. H. Auden's Book of Light Verse by W. H. Auden The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables by Robert Henryson Canaan by Geoffrey Hill Post-War Polish Poetry ed by Czeslaw Milosz Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke   Flight by Linda Bierds  Come and See by Fanny Howe  Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler  Selected Cautionary Verses by Hilaire Belloc Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot  The Voice that is Great Within Us by Hayden Carruth 

Red Bird by Mary Oliver Collected Poems: 1920-54 by Eugenio Montale Human Chain by Seamus Heaney Academic Graffiti by W. H. Auden Notebook 1967-68 by Robert Lowell   Selected Poems by Robert Frost Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman   The Golden Treasury by Francis Turner Palgrave Scottish Love Poems by Antonia Fraser A Hopkins Reader by Gerard Manley Hopkins Repair: Poems by C. K. Williams