Art & Creativity Quote by James Schuyler

Schuyler is telling you his taste in art, but he’s also sneaking in a poetics: the pleasure isn’t in purity, it’s in assemblage. “To change your phrase somewhat” is a small, genial act of revision that signals how he thinks meaning happens - not through grand declarations, but through incremental adjustments, the way a line of poetry corrects itself mid-breath. The modesty is strategic. He’s not issuing a manifesto; he’s performing the method.

The key word is “disparate.” Schuyler, a New York School poet, lived in a scene that prized collage instincts: painting and poetry in constant conversation, a city where high and low culture shared the same street noise. His poems often move by noticing - weather, gossip, color, the quotidian - and trusting that the mind’s attention can braid fragments into felt coherence. In that light, “entity” isn’t a rigid unity; it’s a made thing, a temporary wholeness that comes from arrangement. Think of it as a stance against both academic neatness and romantic self-expression: the self isn’t pouring out, it’s curating.

There’s subtext, too, about community and influence. He’s replying to someone else’s “phrase,” acknowledging that art is conversation, not solitary genius. The line quietly defends hybrid forms and mixed registers: the poem that can hold laundry and lyric, museum light and leftover talk. Schuyler’s intent is less to define art than to endorse a way of living with it - letting difference sit together until it starts to feel like a world.