“Don’t you think that as a people, Americans have less poetry, real poetry, in their souls than any other nations?”

— Robert E. Howard

From a letter to Robert W. Gordon (January 2, 1926)
Letters

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Don’t you think that as a people, Americans have less poetry, real poetry, in their souls than any other nations?" by Robert E. Howard?

Robert E. Howard 145

American author 1906–1936

Related quotes

“His poetry, as a whole, is more nearly the real right thing than any of the poetry of a somewhat older generation than mine except Mr. Yeats's.”

Harold Monro (1879–1932) British poet

T. S. Eliot, in Alida Monro (ed.) The Collected Poems of Harold Monro (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1933) p. xiv.
Criticism

“Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

“Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?"”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.
" Education by Poetry http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/edbypo.html", speech delivered at Amherst College and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly (February 1931)
General sources

“Perhaps you don’t desire poetry as much as you would like to have my torchy knowledge of your possible futures, but I dare say poetry will do you far more good. For knowing the future only makes you timid and complacent by turns, while poetry can shape you into the kind of souls who can face any future with boldness and wisdom and nobility, so that you need not know the future at all, so that any future will be an opportunity for greatness, if you have greatness in you.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Prentice Alvin (1989), Chapter 15.

“However rootedly national it may be, poetry is less and less the prisoner of its own language.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Poetry International Programme note (1967); also in Selected Translations (2006), edited by Daniel Weissbort, p. 10
Context: However rootedly national it may be, poetry is less and less the prisoner of its own language. It is beginning to represent as an ambassador, something far greater than itself. Or perhaps, it is only now being heard for what, among other thngs, it is — a universal language of understanding, coherent behind the many languages in which we can all hope to meet. … We now give more serious weight to the words of a country's poets than to the words of its politicians — though we know the latter may interfere more drastically with our lives. Religions, ideologies, mercantile competition divide us. The essential solidarity of the very diverse poets of the world, besides being mysterious fact is one we can be thankful for, since its terms are exclusively those of love, understanding and patience. It is one of the few spontaneous guarantees of possible unity that mankind can show, and the revival of an appetite for poetry is like a revival of an appetite for all man's saner possibilities, and a revulsion from the materialist cataclysms of recent years and the worse ones which the difference of nations threatens for the years ahead.
The idea of global unity is not new, but the absolute necessity of it has only just arrived, like a sudden radical alteration of the sun, and we shall have to adapt or disappear. If the nations are ever to make a working synthesis of their ferocious contradictions, the plan will be created in spirit before it can be formulated or accepted in political fact. And it is in poetry that we can refresh our hope that such a unity is occupying people's imaginations everywhere, since poetry is the voice of spirit and imagination and all that is potential, as well as of the healing benevolence that used to be the privilege of the gods.

“There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Enemies of Reason, "Slaves to Superstition" [1.01], 13 August 2007, timecode 00:38:16ff
The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)
Variant: Science is the poetry of reality.
Context: The word 'mundane' has come to mean boring and dull, and it really shouldn't. It should mean the opposite because it comes from the latin 'mundus', meaning the world, and the world is anything but dull; the world is wonderful. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.