Edith Sitwell quote: “Poetry is the deification of reality.”

“As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.”

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) British poet

Lecture "Young Poets" (1957) published in Mightier Than the Sword: The P.E.N. Hermon Ould Memorial Lectures, 1953-1961 (1964), p. 56
Variants:
Poetry is the deification of reality.
As quoted in Life magazine (4 January 1963)
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
As quoted in The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women (1992) by Rosalie Maggio, p. 247

“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.

“Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time

“A central concept called into question by net-poetry is the relation with reality.”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

Does it make sense to define "virtual" reality as what actually reaches us through the Internet? How the artist relates to it, how he or she perceives and represents it and how a net-poet should "sing" it? The relationship with reality mediated by the Internet is a network of contacts in itself, it is ontologically a "connective" image of reality, which gradually outlines and qualify itself, both as reality and as representation.
Source: Virtual Mercury House. Planetary & Interplanetary Events, p. 132

“Poetry, like Art, is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.”

Eli Siegel (1902–1978) Latvian-American poet, philosopher

Definition 18 (c) Definition Press, (New York: Definition Press, 1964)

“Experience taken into the body, breathed-in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 221
Context: Experience taken into the body, breathed-in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced.
To stand against the idea of the fallen world, a powerful and destructive idea overshadowing Western poetry. In that sense, there is no lost Eden, and God is the future. The child walled-up in our life can be given his growth. In this growth is our security.

“Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality. …that is a feature of the musical brain.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)
Context: Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality.... that is a feature of the musical brain.

“The pleasure of their (the Imagist poetry is not the satisfaction of discovering little by little, but of seizing at a single blow, in the fullest vitality, the image, a fusion of reality in words.”

René Taupin (1905–1981) French academic

L'Influence du symbolism francais sur la poesie Americaine(de 1910 a 1920), Champion, Paris 1929 trans William Pratt and Anne Rich AMS , New York 1985 ISBN 9780404615796

“Local images have one kind of reality. U.S. 1 will, I hope, have that kind and another too. Poetry can extend the document.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Note, on "The Book of the Dead"
U.S. 1 (1938), The Book of the Dead
Context: This is to be a summary poem of the life of the Atlantic coast of this country, nourished by the communications which run down it. Gauley Bridge is inland, but it was created by theories, systems, and workmen from many coastal sections — factors which are, in the end, not regional or national. Local images have one kind of reality. U. S. 1 will, I hope, have that kind and another too. Poetry can extend the document.

“Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of the inner and outer reality. She has reproduced simplification by this concentration, and as a result the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should never be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry or prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry and prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or inner reality.”

Gertrude Stein book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Source: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), p. 259

“Poetry is the deification of reality.”

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