The Usurpation Of Language (1910)
Context: Though science makes no use for poetry, poetry is enriched by science. Poetry “takes up” the scientific vision and re-expresses its truths, but always in forms which compel us to look beyond them to the total object which is telling its own story and standing in its own rights. In this the poet and the philosopher are one. Using language as the lever, they lift thought above the levels where words perplex and retard its flight, and leave it, at last, standing face to face with the object which reveals itself.
“For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.”
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Adrienne Rich 51
American poet, essayist and feminist 1929–2012Related quotes
“Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways.”
Chaque âge a ses plaisirs, son esprit et ses mœurs.
Canto III, l. 374
The Art of Poetry (1674)
Introduction
The Wedge (1944)
Context: Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety.
“The absence of a monument can, in its own way, be something of a monument also.”
Source: This Immortal (1965), p. 60
“Your capacity to own something is your capacity to change something.”
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 156
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
22
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)