Particularity and Philosophy of Literature -- quotes

Flannery O'Connor

"It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth"

"The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location."

Aristotle

Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.... It clearly follows that the poet or 'maker' should be the maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates are actions.

Tolkien

Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive (compared to the pictorial arts). It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular.

Plutarch

Wherefore those that would give their minds to philosophical studies are not obliged to avoid poetry altogether, but rather to prepare themselves for philosophy by poems, accustoming themselves to search for and embrace that which may profit in that which pleaseth them, and rejecting and discarding that wherein they find nothing of this nature. For this discrimination is the first step to learning.

Jacques Maritain

The poet has realized that he has his own way, which is neither scientific nor philosophical, of knowing the world. Thus the fact of that peculiar kind of knowledge which is poetic knowledge has imposed itself upon philosophical reflection. And it would be no use to try to escape the problem by considering poetry a set of pseudo-statements -- with no meaning -- or a substitute for science intended for feeble-minded people. We must confront in a fair manner the fact of poetic experience and poetic intuition.

..... Because poetry emanates from the free creativity of the spirit, it is from the very start oriented toward expression, and terminates in a word proffered, it wants to speak; whereas mystical experience, because it emanates from the deepest longing of the spirit bent on knowing, tends of itself toward silence and internal fruition. Poetic experience is busy with the created world and the enigmatic and innumerable relations of existents with one another...

Lucille Ball:

That's what a writer does... takes the truth and TWISTS it a bit.

(sorry, couldn't resist that last one -- my kids are watching I Love Lucy and Lucy is trying to write a novel to win a 10,000$ prize).