Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 9, 2025
Formlessness becomes actually the mark of right form in literature of this class; and a novel presented as fictitious autobiography gets the same advantage.
The French Revolution, with its menace of fundamental changes, clashing with sentiments and convictions which ages had rendered habitual and dear, called for an inquiry into great principles and the grounds of things. The Napoleonic age had the terrific formlessness of chaos.
The will to compass self-expression, the will to emerge from darkness to light, from formlessness to form, from nothing to everything this it is that I find in either statue; and this it is in virtue of which the Balzac has unbeknown a brother on the Italian seaboard. Here stands or rather struggles on his pedestal this younger brother, in strange contrast with the scenery about him.
And all that Morgan now looked over again gave back to him the spirit he had put into them. The gaps in his expression of that spirit he was blind to. Shaped in the mould of his peculiar fantasy, these poems lived for the mind that had created them, that had been compelled by its own inner necessity to give them what was to him their particular form, to others their very formlessness.
I think that even then I had an instinctive doubt whether formlessness was really better than formality. Something, it seems to me, may be contained and kept alive in formality, but in formlessness everything spills and wastes away. This is what I find the fatal defect of our American Ossian, Walt Whitman, whose way is where artistic madness lies.
A propitious formlessness in matter is no sort of evil; and evil is so far from being a propitious formlessness in matter that it is rather an impeding form which matter has already assumed. Out of this appears, with sufficient clearness, the rational function which the arts possess. They give, as nature does, a form to matter, but they give it a more propitious form.
Men of wisdom, reflecting on the formlessness of visible objects before birth and after destruction, behold by the aid of intelligence, the formlessness of objects that have apparent forms. So also although the Sun's motion cannot be seen, yet persons, by watching its rising and setting, conclude that the sun has motion.
There in the breach It ravened for me, thrust Itself toward me, pressed against the thin veil of separation between us. I saw nothing, yet knew where It raised Itself, gigantic in formlessness more dreadful than any shape. Its whispered threats broke against me like an evil surf. "Man, the prey is mine. Would you challenge me? The woman is mine by the pact of centuries. Save yourself. Escape."
It is true that his forms frequently enough approach formlessness; that his colours and especially in his earlier music are violent and inharmonious; and that in his ceaseless invention of new patterns his Slav naïveté and lack of humour led him more than a hundred times to write unintentionally comic passages. He is discursive I might say voluble.
As a matter of fact, it is this very frustration that gives poetry much of its depth and vehemence. Great genius expresses itself, not in the freedom of formlessness, but in the limitations of form. Shakespeare's passion turned instinctively to the most frustrative of all poetic forms that of the sonnet in order to express itself in perfection.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking