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Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.

— Al Alvarez The Savage God (1971)

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More quotes by Al Alvarez

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.

The Savage God (1971)

The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.

The Savage God (1971)

His face was blue, on his fingers
Flecks of green. 'This is my father',
I thought.

Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

The Savage God (1971)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Al Alvarez (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.