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.
In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.
My entire soul is a cry, and all my work is a commentary on that cry.
You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?
Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.
Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.
Writing isn't something I do, writing is something that I am. I am writing - it's just an expression of me.
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