“Poets are born knowing the language of angels.”
Source: A Ring of Endless Light
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Madeleine L'Engle 223
American writer 1918–2007Related quotes
“Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.”
Canto X, lines 121–129 (tr. Mandelbaum).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio
Context: O Christians, arrogant, exhausted, wretched,
Whose intellects are sick and cannot see,
Who place your confidence in backward steps,
Do you not know that we are worms and born
To form the angelic butterfly that soars,
Without defenses, to confront His judgment?
Why does your mind presume to flight when you
Are still like the imperfect grub, the worm
Before it has attained its final form?
From A Note on Poetry (circa 1936) quoted in Modern American Poetry (1950) by Louis Untermeyer
General sources
“A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.”
A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)
Letter to Paul Cézanne (16 April 1860), as published in Paul Cézanne : Letters (1995) edited by John Rewald.
Note to The Voice of the Devil
1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793)
“Language steps in where the angels of experience fear to tread.”
Source: Philosophy At The Limit (1990), Chapter 1, The Faces of Silence, p. 5
“Nations are born in the hearts of poets; they prosper and then die in the hands of politicians.”
Stray reflections http://www.allamaiqbal.com/works/prose/english/strayreflections/index.htm
“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
Squares and Oblongs, in Poets at Work (1948), p. 170