Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952); also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 91
Context: The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
“What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.”
Interview with Donald Hall in November 1960, pub.'Paris Review' The Art of Poetry, no 26 (1961)
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Marianne Moore 59
American poet and writer 1887–1972Related quotes
Nobel Lecture (8 December 1990)
Context: Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.
“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize”
...eu já estava na vigésima parte do livro, triste, quando senti que o livro podia ser escrito. Percebi que só seria capaz de escrevê-lo se o fizesse como se contasse. Não passando para a escrita o chamado discurso oral, porque isso é impossível, mas introduzindo na escrita um me-canismo de aparente prolixidade, aparente desor-ganização do discurso. Digo aparente porque sei o trabalho que me deu fazer de conta que era tudo assim.
Interview in Idéias, no. 107 (15 October 1988), trans. Margaret Jull Costa.
"The Autobiography of Sir William Topaz McGonagall".
Other works
“I wanted to find out why Shelley could write better-sounding poetry than I.”
Los Angeles Times (1970); on why he chose to pursue phonetics.
On the release of The Used's album "In Love and Death", interview in David Lindquist (August 6, 2004) "Rising star reserves right to mingle on kids' level - Bert McCracken appears with the Used at X-Fest", The Indianapolis Star, p. G16.
"Letters-General Questions Answered" p. 96 http://www.woz.org/letters/general/96.html
Woz.org files