“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses. Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.”

Letter to Ellen O'Leary (3 February 1889)

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W.B. Yeats255

Irish poet and playwright 1865–1939

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“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Letter to Ellen O'Leary (3 February 1889)

“Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression. … by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking. … There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

English Prose Style (1928)
Literary Quotes

“The work of pure poetry implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to words.”

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet

L'oeuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l'initiative aux mots.
"Crise de Vers", La Revue Blanche (September 1895 )as translated in Mallarmé : The Poet and his Circle ([1999] 2005) by Rosemary Lloyd, p. 55.
Observations

“A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Source: Paris Review interview (1972), p. 251

“I have always loved playing around with words. I didn’t know it was called poetry. I was just an innocent kid messing around with words when an adult said ‘You’re a poet, be published or be damned’.”

Benjamin Zephaniah (1958) English poet and author

On the realization that he was a poet in “Interview with Benjamin Zephaniah” https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/writers/advice/37/a-writers-toolkit/interviews-with-authors/interview-with-benjamin-zephaniah in Writers & Artists

“Words cannot always do the work we need them to. Music is there for when words fail us.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

“So was their meaning to her words. No sword
Of wrath her right arm whirl'd,
But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word
She shook the world.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Lady Clara Vere de Vere

The Poet (1830)
Context: There was no blood upon her maiden robes
Sunn'd by those orient skies;
But round about the circles of the globes
Of her keen
And in her raiment's hem was traced in flame
WISDOM, a name to shake
All evil dreams of power — a sacred name.
And when she spake,
Her words did gather thunder as they ran,
And as the lightning to the thunder
Which follows it, riving the spirit of man,
Making earth wonder,
So was their meaning to her words. No sword
Of wrath her right arm whirl'd,
But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word
She shook the world.

“Dialogue is always tricky. Authenticity is almost impossible, and you always end up sounding too olde worlde. What I do is to strip the words back, so I get the dialogue to sound timeless…”

Tracy Chevalier (1962) American writer

On how she composes character dialogue in “Tracy Chevalier: 'Slavery has to be raised until it's put to bed'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/17/tracy-chevalier-interview-last-runaway in The Guardian (2013 Mar 16)

“Policemen and prisons ought never to be the means used to bring men back to the practice of religion.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

“In a world where young blacks, especially, are bombarded with claims that they are being unfairly targeted by police, and where a general attitude of belligerence is being promoted literally in word and song, it is hard not to wonder whether some people's responses to policemen do not have something to do with the policemen's responses to them. Neither the police nor people in any other occupation always do what is right but automatic belligerence is not the answer.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

"Driving While Black" http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell103107.php3 (31 October 2007), Jewish World Review. <br class="br">2000s

“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses. Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.”

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W.B. Yeats255

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