"I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on"
About this Quote
Rosenberg isn’t promising inspiration; he’s staging a kind of psychic scorched-earth policy. “I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up” reads like a vow to resist the most human wartime reflex: to numb out. The verb “saturate” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s not observation from a safe distance, not the poet as tasteful curator. It’s immersion, an insistence on letting “strange and extraordinary new conditions” soak through him until there’s no dry, protected self left.
The line’s daring subtext is that trauma can be metabolized into art without being domesticated. Rosenberg was writing in the shadow of World War I, where the “new conditions” weren’t aesthetic novelty but industrialized killing, mud, exhaustion, and the moral distortion of living inside a machine. By calling them “strange and extraordinary,” he captures how war warps perception: the horrific becomes routine, the absurd becomes policy. His refusal to “cover up” any corner of consciousness is an ethical stance as much as an artistic one: don’t tidy the experience into patriotic sentiment or acceptable grief.
Then comes the cold comfort: “it will all refine itself into poetry later on.” “Refine” suggests alchemy, but also a delayed processing, an afterlife of experience where language can distill what the moment makes impossible to name. The “later on” is haunting from a poet who died at 27. It exposes the gamble beneath the bravado: that art might arrive in time, and that the self will survive long enough to make it.
The line’s daring subtext is that trauma can be metabolized into art without being domesticated. Rosenberg was writing in the shadow of World War I, where the “new conditions” weren’t aesthetic novelty but industrialized killing, mud, exhaustion, and the moral distortion of living inside a machine. By calling them “strange and extraordinary,” he captures how war warps perception: the horrific becomes routine, the absurd becomes policy. His refusal to “cover up” any corner of consciousness is an ethical stance as much as an artistic one: don’t tidy the experience into patriotic sentiment or acceptable grief.
Then comes the cold comfort: “it will all refine itself into poetry later on.” “Refine” suggests alchemy, but also a delayed processing, an afterlife of experience where language can distill what the moment makes impossible to name. The “later on” is haunting from a poet who died at 27. It exposes the gamble beneath the bravado: that art might arrive in time, and that the self will survive long enough to make it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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