“The atmosphere of poetry today seems strained and unnatural. There is an attempt to force the growth of poetry.”

—  Florence Earle Coates

On poetry

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 "The atmosphere of poetry today seems strained and unnatural. There is an attempt to force the growth of poetry." by Florence Earle Coates?
Florence Earle Coates photo
Florence Earle Coates 22
American writer and poet 1850–1927

Related quotes

“Poetry is not; or seems not to be.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

The Life of Poetry (1949)
Context: Poetry is not; or seems not to be. But it appears that among the great conflicts of this culture, the conflict in our attitude toward poetry stands clearly lit. There are no guards built up to hide it. We call see its expression, and we can see its effects upon us. We can see our own conflict and our own resource if we look, now, at this art, which has been made of all the arts the one least acceptable.
Anyone dealing with poetry and the love of poetry must deal, then, with the hatred of poetry, and perhaps even Ignore with the indifference which is driven toward the center. It comes through as boredom, as name-calling, as the traditional attitude of the last hundred years which has chalked in the portrait of the poet as he is known to this society, which, as Herbert Read says, "does not challenge poetry in principle it merely treats it with ignorance, indifference and unconscious cruelty."
Poetry is foreign to us, we do not let it enter our daily lives.

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

“Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

As quoted in The New York Times (26 March 1961)

“The meanings of poetry take their growth through the interaction of the images and the music of the poem.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 31
Context: The meanings of poetry take their growth through the interaction of the images and the music of the poem. The music is not the rhythm, which is a representation of life, alone. The music involves the interplay of the sounds of words, the length of the sequences, the keeping and breaking of rhythms, and the repetition and variation of syllables unrhymed and rhymed. It also involves the play of ideas and images.

“Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His prose was bad poetry, like his poetry.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'On American Movie Critics' (New York Times Book Review, June 4, 2006)
Essays and reviews

S. H. Raza photo

“If you say Ram Ram Ram and Allah Allah Allah, you will get confused. So one god is enough. For me Bindu has never done the same thing. There is logic in every abstract form that I make. My work is like poetry and it should create a different atmosphere for the visitor. Poetry, literaturea and art seem simple but it is very difficult to understand it.”

S. H. Raza (1922–2016) Indian artist

Indian contemporary artists have not reached my standard: SH Raza

Henry David Thoreau photo

“Poetry — No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

January 26, 1840
Journals (1838-1859)
Context: Poetry — No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician's. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought.

“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Source: The Magus

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Parnassus, Preface (1874)

G. H. Hardy photo

“A painter makes patterns with shapes and colours, a poet with words. A painting may embody an ‘idea’, but the idea is usually commonplace and unimportant. In poetry, ideas count for a good deal more; but, […] the importance of ideas in poetry is habitually exaggerated: '… Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.' [In poetry, ] the poverty of the ideas seems hardly to affect the beauty of the verbal pattern.”

G. H. Hardy book A Mathematician's Apology

A Mathematician's Apology (1941)

Related topics