Life & Wisdom Quote by Eyvind Johnson

Johnson casts writing as labor, not lightning: inspiration has "throes", thought has "eddies", and neither delivers cleanly. The metaphors matter. Throes suggests pain and involuntary force, the body dragged along by something larger than will. Eddies are quieter but trickier - circular currents that look like movement while keeping you in place. Put together, they demystify the romantic poet-figure without dismissing the strange pressures that drive art. Creativity here is less a muse whispering than a wrestle and a whirlpool.

The sentence’s payoff is deliberately modest: the poet "may at last be able" to "arrive at" the "right admixture". Johnson refuses the fantasy of perfect expression. He offers craft as chemistry, a measured mixing of "words and meaning" that implies they are separable, even in tension. Words can be gorgeous and wrong; meaning can be urgent and inert. The poet’s job is to engineer their marriage, not simply report what the mind felt. "Convey" is key: the work isn’t finished when the writer understands something, only when it survives translation into language other people can carry.

Contextually, Johnson’s career - shaped by modernism’s skepticism and a century scarred by propaganda and war - makes that emphasis on precision feel ethical as well as aesthetic. Finding the "right" mixture becomes a stance against both empty lyricism and inflated certainties: a claim that truth in art is made, not proclaimed.