A.S.Kline

Nothing touches on a work of art as little as words of criticism: from them arise more or less unfortunate misunderstandings.

Things are not as comprehensible and sayable as we are commonly led to believe; most of our experiences are unsayable; occurring in a space that no word has ever entered, while most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existents whose life endures alongside our own transient life.

No one can advise or help you, no one. There is but the one remedy. Go within. Find the reason that you write; see if its roots lie deep in your heart, confess to yourself you would die if you could not write. This above all, ask yourself in the silence of night: must I write? Dig deep for an answer. And if it should be in the affirmative, if you can meet this solemn question with a strong and simple I must, then construct your life in accord with that need; your life in its most trivial, its least important hour, must be sign and witness to this urge.

Then draw closer to Nature. Then, seek to say, as if you were the very first to do so, what you see, experience, love, and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too common and ordinary; they are the hardest, since it takes great and mature strength to create something of one’s own where a fine and brilliant tradition already exists.

describe your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these, with quiet, humble, heartfelt sincerity, and use the things around you to express yourself, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your everyday life seems impoverished, don’t blame it; blame yourself, say to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to invoke its riches; since for the creative there is no such thing as poverty, no poor or indifferent place.

And if from this turning within, from this immersion in your own world, poems arise, you will not even think to ask if your verses are good. You will not even seek to interest the journals in your work: since you will see them as your own dear natural possession, a part of your life, a voice therein.

A work of art is good if it is born of necessity. It can only be judged by such an origin: and in no other way.

go into yourself and view the depths from which your life springs; there at the source you will find the answer to the question of whether you must create.

Perhaps you will find your calling as an artist. Take that fate upon yourself, then, and bear its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world unto themself, and find everything there within the self, and in that Nature to which they are connected.

You cannot disturb that development more violently than by looking outside and expecting an answer from outside to those questions that only your innermost feelings might answer perhaps, in your quietest hour.