“How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.”

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Last update Sept. 13, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception." by Gregory Maguire?
Gregory Maguire photo
Gregory Maguire 87
Novelist 1954

Related quotes

Craig Ferguson photo
Herbert Read photo
Hermann Hesse photo

“In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day.”

Variant translation: In the beginning was the myth. Just as the great god composed and struggled for expression in the souls of the Indians, the Greeks and Germanic peoples, so to it continues to compose daily in the soul of every child.
Peter Camenzind (1904)

Tanith Lee photo

“Precognition or self-deception?”

Book Two, Part III “The Island”, Chapter 3 (p. 219)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

Richard Leakey photo
Adrienne Rich photo

“Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

"Legislators of the world" in The Guardian (18 November 2006) http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1950812,00.html
Context: I'm both a poet and one of the "everybodies" of my country. I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire. I hope never to idealise poetry — it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Valléjo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.

Related topics