#on sentimentality

[soircieres]

‘— the amorphous deliquescence of sentimentality.’

— Dorothy Bussy (née Strachey), Olivia (1949)

[anancientheart]

And when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something, until in the end, you begin to suspect that a poet is someone who is moved by everything, who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and laughs and weeps.

Mary Ruefle, from Madness, Rack, & Honey

[anancientheart]

melancholy: when we have sorrows without a name.

Mary Ruefle, from Madness, Rack, & Honey

[exhaustingmemory]

Only highly developed cultures foster feelings of nostalgia. The revolutionists must stop for orangeade.

Madness, Rack, and Honey “On Sentimentality” by Mary Ruefle

[exhaustingmemory]

The poem is nothing but a gigantic, disembodied hand pointing a finger at someone. That finger is a magnet and a conductor: it reaches out to the vague, ill-defined you like God reaching within an inch of Adam and it charges the reader with all the responsibility in the world: go figure these things out for yourself, while you still have blood in your veins.

Madness, Rack, and Honey “On Sentimentality” by Mary Ruefle

[ifthisisawoman]

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

James Baldwin (from Notes of a Native Son)