“Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.”
From Critic and Poet - An Apologue
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Emma Lazarus 15
American poet 1849–1887Related quotes
Preface.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)
Novum Organum (1620)
Context: Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury. For as they have been successful in inducing belief, so they have been effective in quenching and stopping inquiry; and have done more harm by spoiling and putting an end to other men's efforts than good by their own. Those on the other hand who have taken a contrary course, and asserted that absolutely nothing can be known — whether it were from hatred of the ancient sophists, or from uncertainty and fluctuation of mind, or even from a kind of fullness of learning, that they fell upon this opinion — have certainly advanced reasons for it that are not to be despised; but yet they have neither started from true principles nor rested in the just conclusion, zeal and affectation having carried them much too far....
Now my method, though hard to practice, is easy to explain; and it is this. I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. The evidence of the sense, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I retain. But the mental operation which follows the act of sense I for the most part reject; and instead of it I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in, starting directly from the simple sensuous perception.
“People aren’t used to poetry that’s so easy and simple.”
On her work in “ The young ‘Instapoet’ Rupi Kaur: from social media star to bestselling writer” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/27/rupi-kaur-i-dont-fit-age-race-class-of-bestselling-poet-milk-and-honey in The Guardian (2017 May 27)
“The priority for the poet must be his poetry, the poetry must determine his agenda and deadlines”
Poetry Quotes
As quoted in the Introduction to Aesthetics (1842), translated by T. M. Knox, (1979), p. 89
Lectures on Aesthetics (1835)
"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.
At an interview with Stephen Colbert at Montclair Kimberley Academy on January 29th, 2010.
2010s
Diary, 29th August 1932.
Quotation posted with the permission of the National Scottish Library, Edinburgh, Scotland.