A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the depth of perception in modern poetry that engages with the world more profoundly than earlier expressions.
Walter Pater's quote highlights the evolution of consciousness in the appreciation of art and poetry. It suggests that modern poetry embodies a deeper understanding and an intimate connection with the external world, contrasting with previous approaches that may have simply skimmed the surface. This evolution signifies a significant change in how emotions and experiences are expressed through artistic mediums.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the evolution of artistic expression in modern literature.
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life . . . Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end . . . For art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
No, there's not much competition between puppeteers in general because everybody's working their own style.
I have said no to many, many Day of the Dead projects in the past, about 10 or 15, because every time I heard a take it was from someone who didn't know the celebration.
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.
I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?
With almost no exceptions, art by men is much more expensive than art by women. Even great women artists, like Louise Bourgeois and Lee Krasner, are only fully embraced very late in their career.
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