“Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.”
Source: Under the Glacier
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Halldór Laxness 216
Icelandic author 1902–1998Related quotes

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize”

"Legislators of the world" in The Guardian (18 November 2006)
Context: Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, glib or visionary, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. What's pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images — is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism — a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? Poetry has the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom — that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This on-going future, written-off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented.
There is always that in poetry which will not be grasped, which cannot be described, which survives our ardent attention, our critical theories, our late-night arguments. There is always (I am quoting the poet/translator Américo Ferrari|) "an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides".

“Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.”

Implosion Magazine, No. 96, p. 4. (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

“The poetry of earth is never dead.”
" Sonnet. On the Grasshopper and the Cricket http://www.bartleby.com/126/28.html"
Poems (1817)

The Art of Poetry - interview 1995 with Downing & Kunitz