Part I : Contemporary Issues in Science, Ch. 1 : "The Scientist as Rebel"; this first appeared in New York Review of Books (25 May 1995).
The Scientist As Rebel (2006)
Context: There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it. And what is true of science is true of poetry.... Poetry and science are gifts given to all of humanity.
“Inspiration is inbreathing, indwelling, poetry can never be entirely willed. It may be true a poet is given only a single line but that line is a gift from the unconscious, intution, a perception.”
How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)
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Edward Hirsch 11
1950Related quotes
“He who improvises can never make a perfect line of poetry.”
As quoted in A Dictionary of Art and Artists (1959) by Peter Murray and Linda Murray, p. 321.
undated quotes
Geometry as a Branch of Physics (1949)
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), II Linear Perspective
“The line is a way of thinking in poetry, by poetry.. it paces the poem.”
'Five points' vol 4 no 2 Georgia State University Press Winter 2000
Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 246 (p. 257 in 1950 edition)
Olga Carlisle in The New York Times, September 11, 1966.
Criticism
“There is no true poetry unconcious inspiration.”
How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)