Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.
Interpretation
Great poetry evokes our most basic emotions rather than refining us.
Robinson Jeffers suggests that poetry, rather than serving to civilize or improve society, actually reaches down to our most fundamental and primitive instincts. In this view, poetry is a powerful force that resonates with raw human emotion, potentially revealing our true, unrefined selves rather than elevating us to a more civilized state.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of art on human nature, this quote can illustrate how poetry connects with our base emotions.
As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man. But we are what we are, and we might remember not to hate any person, for all are vicious; And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved; And not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.
Nature knows that people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve ... As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves. We must unhumanize our views a little and become confident as the rock and ocean that we are made from.
Does it matter whether you hate yourself? At least love your eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music, the thunder of the wings.
I've changed my ways a little, I cannot now Run with you in the evenings along the shore, Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment, You see me there.
You making haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.
Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made / Something more equal to the centuries / Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the esthetic event.
I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema.
Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.
One of the privileges you have of living the life of an artist and creating your own world and everything is the fact that, in-between times, you can kind of spend them however you want. Because, you know, once you open up your candy store again, you're open for business. And you have to be responsible. You have to be available.
Thereβs a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point.
I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.
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