"genus irritable": View from San Miniato al Monte. We walked from the Duomo which is next to our apartment. You can see it in the background.

". . . That poets (using the word comprehensively, as including artists in general) are a genus irritable, is well understood. . . An artist is an artist only by dint of his exquisite sense of Beauty — a sense affording him rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time implying or involving, an equally exquisite sense of Deformity, of disproportion. Thus a wrong — an injustice — done a poet who is really a poet, excites him to a degree which, to ordinary apprehension, appears disproportionate with the wrong. Poets see injustice never where it does not exist — but very often where the unpoetical see no injustice whatever. Thus the poetical irritability has no reference to ‘temper’ in the vulgar sense, but merely to a more than usual clear-sightedness in respect to wrong: — this clear-sightedness being nothing more than a corollary from the vivid perceptions of right — of justice — of proportion. . . But one thing is clear — that the man who is not ‘irritable’ (to the ordinary apprehension), is no poet.” ~Edgar Allan Poe

"genus irritable"

Thursday, May 23, 2019

View from San Miniato al Monte. We walked from the Duomo which is next to our apartment. You can see it in the background.

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