Logan [Pearsall Smith] had given me a piece of advice, unexpected from him. "If you feel that your pen is running away with you, let it run". I had been brought up on the opposite principle ('Easy writing makes hard reading', etc.) but I have learned from experience that Logan was right. If words come tumbling out it gives to one's style an energy and a rhythm that cannot be achieved by deliberation, and one can enjoy the pleasures of polishing later.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, July 01, 2013
Currente Calamo
Kenneth Clark (1903-1983), Another Part of the Wood: A Self-Portrait (London: John Murray, 1974; rpt. 1976), p. 172: