Visionary Poets Quotes

A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!

The gentle pulsing and flickering of stars and nebulae made a kind of music, a sweet easy mesh of whispered tones and sighing harmonies that held him in its force like the earth [holding] the moon.

Bless the poets, the workers for justice, the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache, the visionaries, all makers and carriers of fresh meaning—We will all make it through, despite politics and wars, despite failures and misunderstandings. There is only love.

This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything--as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.

Who Am I? I’m a creator, a visionary, a poet. I approach the world with the eyes of an artist, the ears of a musician, and the soul of a writer. I see rainbows where others see only rain, and possibilities when others see only problems. I love spring flowers, summer’s heat on my body, and the beauty of the dying leaves in the fall. Classical music, art museums, and ballet are sources of inspiration, as well as blues music and dim cafes. I love to write; words flow easily from my fingertips, and my heart beats rapidly with excitement as an idea becomes a reality on the paper in front of me. I smile often, laugh easily, and I weep at pain and cruelty. I'm a learner and a seeker of knowledge, and I try to take my readers along on my journey. I am passionate about what I do. I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me.

The scarily brilliant Romantic poet and visionary William Blake dared to say what many of us have perhaps thought but kept to ourselves: “A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there’s more conversation.

Clarissa, sane Clarissa-exultant, ordinary Clarissa- will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasure, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die.

Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

The hallucinations are innumerable. That's what has always been the matter with me, in fact: no belief in history, obliviousness of principles. I shall say no more about this: poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am a thousand times the richest, let's be as miserly as the sea.

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

The child is father to the man” is a Romantic riddle that turns worldly hierarchy on its head. It means that the child is in some sense the superior of the man; the child is wiser than the man. Ironically, the eventual broad acceptance of this truth did not so much liberate the Victorian bourgeois as it haunted them and gave them a bad conscience. They sensed that the poets were right.

...if vision is restricted to a belief system, or if it is divorced from all belief systems, it ceases to be vision. What is necessary is that it not restrict itself to a belief system but that belief systems always fall within the scope of poetic horizons... Visionaries (what we shall refer to as poets) do not destroy the walls, but show the openings through them. They do not promise what believers will see, only that the walls do not contain the horizon.

Your soul may well consist of artists and artisans, crooks and charlatans, writers and wanderers, poets and performers, vagabonds and visionaries, cigar box jugglers and contortionists, sword swallowers, storey-tellers and snake worshippers, fire eaters and fire dancers, human cannonballs, treasure hunters, swashbuckling pirates, pilgrims, Bedouin tribesmen and Gypsies. Everything that’s rash and wild inside of you is striving for freedom. And I’m not asking for this to hit you like an epiphany. It’s not supposed to. But if you read that list of misfits above and gave just the tiniest of nods – even at a deep subliminal level – then you understand

What do you think he saw?" Damn--I regret the awed way I phrased that and the hushed voice I used. As if I think acid is a "religious" experience, a visionary thing. "Himself," Josh says. "You always see your true self on acid. You just usually see more than you want to see. So it all seems disorted." See what I mean? He's not your normal stoner. The guy should become a poet, a psychologist, a scientist. We pull up near Greg's house and stare at it like it's a damn fortress. "You don't think he needs to go to the hospital?" I ask. "Nope," Josh says. "For a while, I thought maybe, yeah. But he's good now, he's off it, he's not hallucinating anymore." "You're sure?" "Yeah." "'Cuz you can die on LSD-" "That's such anti-drug propaganda bullshit, Dan," Josh interrupts. "Nobody's ever died from an LSD overdose. Ever. As long as you keep people from doing stupid things while they're tripping, it's all good man, man. Why do you think I babysat him?" He reaches into the backseat and punches my shoulder. "LSD isn't your dad's smack. So stop worrying." I scrunch down in the seat. How'd he know about that? "Right. What's the plan?" "I'd ask him if ther was a key hidden under a rock," Josh says, "but he's not gonna be much help. Watch." He pokes Greg in the leg, prods him on the shoulder, grabs his cheeks and smushes them together, the way parents do to a baby, and says, " Ootchi googi Greggy, did ums have a good trippy? Did ums find out itty-bitty singies about oos-self zat oos didn't likeums?" Yup... Greg was in his own little world...

The truth is that poets are human beings, and what a poet has to say about his work is often far from being the most illuminating word on the subject. What is required of us, then, is nothing less than to defend the importance of the visionary experience against the poet himself.

Art is childhood, after all,” wrote Rilke

The poet makes himself into a visionary by a long derangement of all the senses.

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

Will suddenly remembered that a boy at his old school had had a mum like Fiona - not exactly like her, because it seemed to Will that Fiona was a peculiarly contemporary creation, with her seventies albums, her eighties politics and her nineties foot lotion, but certainly a sixties equivalent of Fiona. Stephen Fullick's mother had a thing about TV, that it turned people into androids, so they didn't have a set in the house. 'Did you see Thund...' Will would say every Monday morning and then remember and blush, as if the TV were a parent who had just died. And what good had that done Stephen Fullick? He was not, as far as Will was aware, a visionary poet, or a primitive painter; he was probably stuck in some provincial solicitor's office, like everyone else from school. He had endured years of pity for no discernible purpose.

What the songs do,’ Shirley confides, ‘is take me into that world [of the past]; they take you back centuries. In a twelve-verse song, you can be transported, and I think that’s such a strength in a song, that it can take you on a journey. Sometimes you don’t even know what sort of journey you’ve gone on, because a lot of the meanings have eroded over the years, and you just get glimpses of lives. Not through the words of a great playwright or poet or author, but just through the minds and mirrors of ordinary people. I think one of the reasons the country’s in such trouble is that nobody’s connected to it, to their ancestors or what’s gone before. And if other people’s lives aren’t important, I don’t know how your own can be.

After all, what is 'poetry itself'? Where are its horizons? What draws a reader to 'read' the world and their own self through this particular medium, even if only occasionally? Because it is often on 'occasions'—sacred or ritualised moments, or moments made holy by celebration or grief—that poetry is reached for, its peculiar intensity and compression instinctively demanded. But this is not a separation from life; rather, it is an illumination of it.

t is discovered an extraordinary similarity between Nietzsche and the Hindu-Aryan Rishi, visionary poets of the Vedas. They also thought the ideas from outside to inside: they 'appeared' to them. Rishi means 'he who sees'. See an Idea, express it, or try to express it. The job of the Rishis has been fulfilled for millennia and the vision of the Vedas was revised, elaborated, in subsequent visions, in scholastics, in doctrinal buildings and sophisticated verifications, through centuries. In any case, he, who preached not to subtract anything that life offers as Will of Power, as possession, increasing its power, lived chaste, like a yogi, always looking for the highest tensions of the soul, climbing always, more and more lonely, to be able to open up to that style of thinking, where the ideas could possess him as the most authentic expression of life, as his 'pulse', hitting him in the center of the personal being, or of the existence there accumulated, and that he called, long before Jung and any other psychologist, the Self, to differentiate it from the conscious and limited self, from the rational self. Let's clarify, then. What Nietzsche called thinking is something else, Nietzsche did not think with his head (because 'synchronistically' it hurt) but with the Self, with all of life and, especially, 'with the feet'. 'I think with my feet,' he said, 'because I think walking, climbing.' That is, when the effort and exhaustion caused the conscious mind to enter a kind of drowsiness or semi-sleep, there it took possession of the work of thinking that 'other thing', the Self, opening up to the dazzling penetration of the Idea, or that expression of the Original Power of Life, of Being, of the Will of Power, which crosses man from part to part, as in a yoga samadhi, or in a kaivalya, from an ancient rishi, or Tantric Siddha. Also like those rays that pierced the Etruscan 'fulgurators', to change them, and that they were able to resist thanks to a purified technique of concentration and initiation preparation. That this is a deep Aryan, Hyperborean, that is, Nordic-polar, Germanic style of origins ('let's face ourselves, we are Hyperborean'), and that he knew it, is proved in the name he gave his more beautiful, bigger work: 'Thus spoke Zarathustra'. Zarathustra is the Aryan Magician-reformer of ancient Persia.

Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists. I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.) Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.) Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. Thank you.

It is discovered an extraordinary similarity between Nietzsche and the Hindu-Aryan Rishi, visionary poets of the Vedas. They also thought the ideas from outside to inside: they 'appeared' to them. Rishi means 'he who sees'. See an Idea, express it, or try to express it. The job of the Rishis has been fulfilled for millennia and the vision of the Vedas was revised, elaborated, in subsequent visions, in scholastics, in doctrinal buildings and sophisticated verifications, through centuries. In any case, he, who preached not to subtract anything that life offers as Will of Power, as possession, increasing its power, lived chaste, like a yoga, always looking for the highest tensions of the soul, climbing always, more and more lonely, to be able to open up to that style of thinking, where the Ideas could possess him as the most authentic expression of life, as his 'pulse', hitting him in the center of the personal being, or of the existence there accumulated, and that he called, long before Jung and any other psychologist, the Self, to differentiate it from the conscious and limited self, from the rational self. Let's clarify, then. What Nietzsche called thinking is something else, Nietzsche did not think with his head (because 'synchronistically' hurt) but with the Self, with all of life and, especially, 'with the feet'. 'I think with my feet,' he said, 'because I think walking, climbing.

breath, life after seven decades plus three years is a lot of breathing. seventy three years on this earth is a lot of taking in and giving out, is a life of coming from somewhere and for many a bunch of going nowhere. how do we celebrate a poet who has created music with words for over fifty years, who has showered magic on her people, who has redefined poetry into a black world exactness thereby giving the universe an insight into darkroads? just say she interprets beauty and wants to give life, say she is patient with phoniness and doesn’t mind people calling her gwen or sister. say she sees the genius in our children, is visionary about possibilities, sees as clearly as ray charles and stevie wonder, hears like determined elephants looking for food. say that her touch is fine wood, her memory is like an african roadmap detailing adventure and clarity, yet returning to chicago’s south evans to record the journey. say her voice is majestic and magnetic as she speaks in poetry, rhythms, song and spirited trumpets, say she is dark skinned, melanin rich, small-boned, hurricane-willed, with a mind like a tornado redefining the landscape. life after seven decades plus three years is a lot of breathing. gwendolyn, gwen, sister g has not disappointed our expectations. in the middle of her eldership she brings us vigorous language, memory, illumination. she brings breath. (Quality: Gwendolyn Brooks at 73)

. . . [T]o live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness - without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit holds its breath and hopes to be immortal because it does not live - is no longer a rarefied project. Just as machinery has embodied ideas of good, so the technology of destruction has also acquired a metaphysical character. The practical questions have thus become the ultimate questions as well. Annihilation is no longer a metaphor. Good and Evil are real. The inspired condition is therefore no visionary matter. It is not reserved for gods, kings, poets, priests, shrines, but belongs to mankind and to all of existence.

The institutionalized practices of excluding women from the ideological work of society are the reason we have a history constructed largely from the perspective of men, and largely about men. This is why we have so few women poets and why the records of those who survived the hazards of attempting poetry are so imperfect.40 This is why we know so little of women visionaries, thinkers, and political organizers.41 This is why we have an anthropology that tells us about other societies from the perspective of men and hence has so distorted the cross-cultural record that it may now be impossible to learn what we might have known about how women lived in other forms of society. This is why we have a sociology that is written from the perspective of positions in a male-dominated ruling class and is set up in terms of the relevances of the institutional power structures that constitute those positions.42 This is why in English literature there is a corner called “women in literature” or “women novelists” and an overall critical approach to literature that assumes it is written by men and perhaps even largely for men. This is why the assumptions of psychological research43 and of educational research and philosophy take for granted male experience, orientation, and concerns and treat as normative masculine modes of being.

I have noticed that many intellectuals turn themselves off the instant they are confronted with the words witchcraft, magic, occultism, and religion, as if such ideas exert a dangerous power that might weaken their rational faculties. Yet many of these people maintain a generous openness about visionaries, poets, and artists, some of whom may be quite mad according to “rational” standards. They are fascinated by people of diverse professions and lifestyles who have historical ties with, let us say, the Transcendentalists or the Surrealists, as long as the word occult is not mentioned. If Neo-Paganism were presented as an intellectual and artistic movement whose adherents have new perceptions of the nature of reality, the place of whose adherents have new perceptions of the nature of reality, the place of sexuality, and the meaning of community, academics would flock to study it. Political philosophers would write articles on the Neo-Pagans’ sense of wonder and the minority vision they represent. Literary critics would compare the poetic images in the small magazines published and distributed by the groups with images in the writings of Blake and Whitman. Jungian psychologists would rush to study the Neo-Pagans’ use of ancient archetypes and their love of the classics and ancient lore. But words like witch and pagan do not rest easily in the mind or on the tongue. Although reporting on Paganism and Wicca has improved in the last decade, pop journalists often still present a Neo-Paganism composed of strange characters and weird rites.

What is the meaning of the antithetical concepts Apollonian and Dionysian which I have introduced into the vocabulary of Aesthetic, as representing two distinct modes of ecstasy? — Apollonian ecstasy acts above all as a force stimulating the eye, so that it acquires the power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are essentially visionaries. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the whole system of passions is stimulated and intensified, so that it discharges itself by all the means of expression at once, and vents all its power of representation, of imitation, of transfiguration, of transformation, together with every kind of mimicry and histrionic display at the same time. The essential feature remains the facility in transforming, the inability to refrain from reaction (—a similar state to that of certain hysterical patients, who at the slightest hint assume any role). It is impossible for the Dionysian artist not to understand any suggestion; no outward sign of emotion escapes him, he possesses the instinct of comprehension and of divination in the highest degree, just as he is capable of the most perfect art of communication. He enters into every skin, into every passion: he is continually changing himself. Music as we understand it today is likewise a general excitation and discharge of the emotions; but, notwithstanding this, it is only the remnant of a much richer world of emotional expression, a mere residuum of Dionysian histrionism. For music to be made possible as a special art, quite a number of senses, and particularly the muscular sense, had to be paralysed (at least relatively: for all rhythm still appeals to our muscles to a certain extent): and thus man no longer imitates and represents physically everything he feels, as soon as he feels it. Nevertheless that is the normal Dionysian state, and in any case its primitive state. Music is the slowly attained specialisation of this state at the cost of kindred capacities.

In Rimbaud’s eyes the poet, like the Sufi, is someone who is tormented internally, rejected by society and cast out by the morality of ‘religious orthodoxy’ but who accepts this reality and his punishment. For the method that leads you to the truth does not come from the social order, but from the other, which pierces it – an order that orthodoxy itself regards as an outsider and considers to be insane. The Sufi, like the visionary poet, has a superior knowledge of how to gauge the truth, but when it comes to gauging the social or orthodox external, he is an unbeliever and cursed.

Phobia of Wikipedia *** It bothers me nothing that If silly ones of Wikipedia Decline my notability. Whereas scholars, academics, Intellectuals and visionary ones Acknowledge, admire, and appreciate More than only the notability Since the world's geniuses, philosophers Notable personas do not require internet Wikipedia or such websites Factually, Wikipedia is nothing.  Other than a phobia that Rides on the minds of celebrities, Writers, poets, authors, and others To be on the Wiki article for notability As a reality, the academic world Rejects its reliability and quality. One realizes its articles stay the same. Years and years, or each movement Changing its shape and content By the idiots, fools, having no other job Wasting and killing their time on Wikipedia For self-ego, self-vanity, and self-editor Without qualification for that The free labour of its founder, who Benefits and enjoys millions of dollars For a comfortable life The stupidity prevails without resistance.

How many artists and poets has poverty denied us? How many diplomats and visionaries? How many political and spiritual leaders? How many nurses and engineers and scientists? Think of how many more of us would be empowered to thrive if we tore down the walls, how much more vibrant and forward-moving our country would be.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.     —RalphWaldo Emerson; American poet, essayist, visionary, giver

over the centuries Dante has been variously "constructed" - as lover, statesman, neo-Platonist, proto-Protestant, Romantic visionary, Byronic hero, Pre-Raphaelite, father of his country, theologian in verse, precursor of the modern novel, and, finally, altissimo poeta, the consummate poet.

Great poets are all philosophers too profound to systematize their ideas. Inside every dark visionary is a being of insidious reason waiting patiently for his host to die. From the cleft of the creative arises the categorical flower.

The rain dripping, a wing flashing, some one passing—the commonest sounds and sights have power to fling one, as I seem to remember, from the heights of rapture to the depths of despair. And if the actual life is thus extreme, the visionary life should be free to follow. Write then, now that you are young, nonsense by the ream. Be silly, be sentimental, imitate Shelley, imitate Samuel Smiles, give the rein to every impulse; commit every fault of style, grammar, taste, and syntax; pour out; tumble over; loose anger, love, satire, in whatever words you can catch, coerce or create, in whatever metre, prose, poetry, or gibberish that comes to hand. Thus you will learn to write.

The rain dripping, a wing flashing, someone passing—the commonest sounds and sights have power to fling one, as I seem to remember, from the heights of rapture to the depths of despair. And if the actual life is thus extreme, the visionary life should be free to follow.

The Versed Shapeshifter by Stewart Stafford The poet casts profundity's light, On untouched depths of consciousness, Truffles mined from reality's seam, Sharpened quills from a full armoury. Visionary heralds, core journalists, Healers of the heart's collective scars, Distilling matured verity from mystic grapes, Tossing tropes to make their alchemist salad. Inventors, composers, focusing global eyes, A seismic shift rebooting sentient bedrock, Cartographers mapping the human way, A bard's verbal progeny on boundless legs. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

I have noticed that many intellectuals turn themselves off the instant they are confronted with the words witchcraft, magic, occultism, and religion, as if such ideas exert a dangerous power that might weaken their rational faculties. Yet many of these people maintain a generous openness about visionaries, poets, and artists, some of whom may be quite mad according to “rational” standards. They are fascinated by people of diverse professions and lifestyles who have historical ties with, let us say, the Transcendentalists or the Surrealists, as long as the word occult is not mentioned. If Neo-Paganism were presented as an intellectual and artistic movement whose adherents have new perceptions of the nature of reality, the place of whose adherents have new perceptions of the nature of reality, the place of sexuality, and the meaning of community, academics would flock to study it. Political philosophers would write articles on the Neo-Pagans’ sense of wonder and the minority vision they represent. Literary critics would compare the poetic images in the small magazines published and distributed by the groups with images in the writings of Blake and Whitman. Jungian psychologists would rush to study the Neo-Pagans’ use of ancient archetypes and their love of the classics and ancient lore. But words like witch and pagan do not rest easily in the mind or on the tongue. Although reporting on Paganism and Wicca has improved in the last decade, pop journalists often still present a Neo-Paganism composed of strange characters and weird rites

Some, in fact, never lose the glorious vision of childhood. This is particularly true of artists (and, indeed, seems a vital part of what makes them artists). William Blake, the English painter, printmaker, and poet, appears to have been one such person. He inhabited a uniquely visionary world. Blake perceived something closer to what the philosopher Immanuel Kant termed “the thing in itself”1 than do most mortals, left as we are with the pale reflection of our surroundings that our increasingly restricted mature perceptions deliver to us.

Most people associate the Nazis with book burning. Everyone has seen on television or the Internet the Dantesque images of students throwing hundreds of books into the fire in the streets and squares of German cities in the 1930s. True funeral pyres of Western civilization, they were a barbaric prelude to the burning of human beings, exactly as the German poet Heinrich Heine described in a visionary way. Much less well-known is the meticulous looting carried out by the Nazis in libraries throughout Europe. Prior to my conversation with Albert, I had heard something about it, but was unaware of both the reasons why this massive theft had taken place or of its size. While the theft of a work of art is usually done out of artistic passion or simple greed, what could have driven the Nazis to transport tons of books in train wagons across Europe? And it was not a selective exercise, no—the books were taken in bulk without any sorting. That is, they were removed without prior knowledge of their value. One particularly striking fact explains the Nazi regime’s interest in Jewish books. According to one of its most influential ideologues, Alfred Rosenberg, it was important for future generations to know the enemy after their final defeat. That is why public and private Jewish libraries were ransacked throughout Europe to fill the shelves of the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage, the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. In the eyes and most delirious dreams of the Nazis, it was a research institute dedicated to studying a people that was doomed to extinction.

But this, in turn, was complicated by the need for commercial music, in a crowded marketplace, to promote and develop artists as individual, larger-than-life personalities – a significant break with the anonymous collective transmission of folk music. Dallas creates a useful distinction between purely pop performers – cogs in the capitalist music machine – and pure folk traditionalists such as Harry Cox, by denoting in-between, post-Dylan ‘rock poets’ as ‘Byronic’.

The Young Tradition’s third and final album, Galleries (1968), was an epic of time-banditry, whizzing through the seven ages of English folk song, from field to ballad to seventeenth-century Puritan hymns. It boldly juxtaposed music by Renaissance poet Thomas Campion and Methodist preacher Charles Wesley, making one daring leap forward to blues singer Robert Johnson’s complaint of stones in his passway, and with a pastiche ‘Medieval Mystery Tour’ copped from Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. A staple diet of English folk was also included in the shape of ‘John Barleycorn’, ‘The Husband and the Servingman’ and ‘The Bitter Withy’. But the most eyebrow-raising element was the instrumental ensemble that made its guest appearance on two songs, Campion’s ‘What If a Day’ and the traditional ‘Agincourt Carol’. The Early Music Consort’s David Munrow, Christopher Hogwood and Roddy and Adam Skeaping were among the first of a new breed of authentic instrumentalists, avid collectors of medieval rebecs, shawms and hurdy-gurdies, reviving a medieval Gothic and Renaissance repertoire all but lost to the classical mainstream. Their approach was at once scholarly and populist; in what was to prove a short life, Munrow managed to raise the profile of Early Music significantly, with around fifty recordings and plentiful appearances on TV and radio. Munrow and Bellamy had this in common: neither was afraid to tilt quixotically at a canon.

Only three, visionary and golden figures were born on the soil of present Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and Muhammad Iqbal, the national poet, philosopher and the thinker of Pakistan and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the founder of the constitution and the hero of atomic energy.

On the homunculus the shadow of doom announced by Spengler and Lawrence falls more tragically than on the proud. Oswald Spengler, the prophet of cyclical history, D. H. Lawrence, the psychologist of love and sex, and Henry Miller, the visionary who perceives his wisdom in the microcosm of the heart, are all contained in the boy-prophet Arthur Rimbaud and in Jim Morrison, the rock singer who strives to "break on through to the other side".

I don't know if the young Einstein had encountered the Paradiso during his intellectual wanderings in Italy, and whether or not the vivid imagination of the Italian poet may have had a direct influence on his intuition that the universe might be both finite and without boundary. Whether or not such influence occurred, I believe that this example demonstrates how great science and great poetry are both visionary, and may even arrive at the same intuitions. Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. … We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

… the several sub-types of mental illness should be functioning on this world as classes somewhat like those of ancient India. These people here, the hebephrenics, would be equivalent to the untouchables[*]. The maniacs would be the warrior class, without fear; one of the highest. … … The paranoids – actually paranoiac schizophrenics – would function as the statesman class; they’d be in charge of developing political ideology and social programs – they’d have the overall world view. The simple schizophrenics (…) [would] correspond to the poet class, although some of them would be religious visionaries – as would be some of the Heebs. The Heebs, however, would be inclined to produce ascetic saints, whereas the schizophrenics would produce dogmatists. Those with polymorphic schizophrenia simplex would be the creative members of the society, producing the new ideas. (…) There could be some with over-valent ideas, psychotic disorders that were advanced forms of milder obsessive-compulsive neurosis, the so-called diencephalic disturbances. Those people would be the clerks and office holders of the society, the ritualistic functionaries, with no original ideas. Their conservatism would balance the radical quality of the polymorphic schizophrenics and give the society stability.

Did the gods once mingle with humankind, or is Homer a visionary madman, or, what is worse, a mere poet, a maker-up of beautiful falsities, an elegant liar? I shall grapple with that perplexity, only to emerge as I went in, in a cloud of unknowing, if perhaps a little the wiser.

Real dreams are about seeing what others miss. If you have your head in the clouds, you can see the world more clearly. Maybe this is why so many poets and visionaries die young or drink heavily—it is painful when you can see the truth up close. It can be unbearable.

The road to Roncevaux lures the poet and the visionary like a drug, but the soldier pays for the real estate. I turned north and followed