
“Let us look to beautiful poetry for the material of a beautiful prose.”
Patches of Sunlight
“Let us look to beautiful poetry for the material of a beautiful prose.”
“I believe that only poetry counts… A great novelist is first of all a great poet.”
“What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.”
Interview with Donald Hall in November 1960, pub.'Paris Review' The Art of Poetry, no 26 (1961)
'Rhymes's Reason':a guide to English Verse Yale University Press, 1981
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1039/1039-h/1039-h.htm
“Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.”
As quoted in Advances in Biochemical Psychopharmacology, Vol. 25 (1980), p. 3
R. S. Thomas : Priest and Poet, BBC TV (2 April 1972)
Context: Any form of orthodoxy is just not part of a poet's province … A poet must be able to claim … freedom to follow the vision of poetry, the imaginative vision of poetry … And in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet, the New Testament is metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and preacher as one who is to present poetry; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity, and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects. … My work as a poet has to deal with the presentation of imaginative truth.
The Coal Question (1865)
Context: Commerce is but a means to an end, the diffusion of civilization and wealth. To allow commerce to proceed until the source of civilization is weakened and overturned is like killing the goose to get the golden egg. Is the immediate creation of material wealth to be our only object?