Life & Wisdom Quote by Max Eastman

Eastman hands emotion a startling amount of authority: not just a catalyst for poetry, but its judge and officiant. Calling emotion the "surest arbiter" is a quiet rebuke to the idea that poems are built primarily out of technique, intellect, or inherited rules. The word "choice" matters. He treats poetry as a sequence of decisions - what image survives, what rhythm lands, what line break earns its silence - and insists the most reliable decision-maker isn’t theory but felt experience.

Then he escalates, pivoting from craftsmanship to metaphysics. Emotion becomes "the priest of all supreme unions in the mind", a deliberately ceremonial metaphor that frames meaning-making as a kind of marriage: sensation fused to idea, private memory welded to public language, instinct joined to form. Priesthood implies legitimacy and ritual, not mere impulse. Eastman isn’t arguing for unedited gush; he’s arguing that the deepest coherence in art comes when feeling consecrates the link between disparate mental elements.

The subtext is also polemical. Eastman moved through early-20th-century battles over modernism, politics, and the status of art in a mechanizing culture. This line reads like a pushback against both academic formalism and a cold, “scientific” attitude toward aesthetics: you can analyze poems all day, but the final yes-or-no is visceral. His intent is to defend emotion as an epistemology - a way of knowing - and to claim poetry as the place where that knowledge performs its highest work: making unions that feel inevitable, even when they’re newly invented.