“None of you knows what creativity means. To paint a picture, to write a poem? No! To recast one’s whole age, to impose upon it the stamp of one’s will, to fill it with beauty, to overwhelm it, to overpower it with one’s spirit.”
cited in Zarathustra’s Children (2000), p. 178
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Christian Morgenstern21
German author 1871–1914Related quotes
A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) American poet
Paris Review interview (1996)
Context: Unless I have something already moving through the mind, I don’t go to the typewriter at all. The world has so many poems in it, it has never seemed to me very smart to force one more upon the world. If there isn’t one there to write, you just leave it alone.
Alice Oswald (1966) British poet
Get Writing (2004), as quoted in Modern Women Poets (2005) by Deryn Rees-Jones, p. 392
Context: Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself. Not a message that comes at the end of the poem, more like a pathological condition that deforms every word – a resonance, a manner of speaking, a nervous tic, a pressure. And this invisible subject only shows up when you're speaking the language that you speak when no one is there to correct or applaud you. Remembering that language is the whole skill of writing well.
Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 2.
“I know very well that one must fight, for one is often in contradiction to the spirit of the age.”
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor
As quoted in "Rodin freed human spirit" in The Des Moines Register (7 January 2007) http://www.dmregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070107/ENT01/701070305 <br class="br">21st century
“or that writing a poem you can read to no one
is like dancing in the dark.”
Ovid (-43–17 BC) Roman poet
Source: The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters
A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) American poet
Paris Review interview (1996)
Context: I’ve always been highly energized and have written poems in spurts. From the god-given first line right through the poem. And I don’t write two or three lines and then come back the next day and write two or three more; I write the whole poem at one sitting and then come back to it from time to time over the months or years and rework it.
