The great artists of the world are never Puritans,...

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Polyphilus holds ideas and images that I want to keep in one place, so that they can stimulate my own art making.

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10:04 am - Fri, Jan 6, 2012: 29 notes

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman. The actual effect of repression, lamentable though it may be, is to destroy idealism altogether. The Puritan, for all his pretensions, is the worst of materialists. Passed through his sordid and unimaginative mind, even the stupendous romance of sex is reduced to a disgusting transaction in physiology. As artist he is thus hopeless; as well expect an auctioneer to qualify for the Sistine Chapel choir. All he ever achieves, taking pen or brush in hand, is a feeble burlesque of his betters, all of whom, by his hog’s theology, are doomed to hell.

H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: First Series