“Poetry, like life, states that the very self of a thing is its relations, its having-to-do-with other things. Whatever is in the world, whatever person, has meaning because it or he has to do with the whole universe: immeasurable and crowded reality. The technique of poetry aims for the intensification of a thing through showing the likeness of what is in that thing to something else--to everything else, as different.”

—  Eli Siegel

Preface, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, 1957

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Eli Siegel 19
Latvian-American poet, philosopher 1902–1978

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