“None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.”
Source: The Greek Way (1930), Ch. 11
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Edith Hamilton 26
American teacher and writer 1867–1963Related quotes

“There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.”

“The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.”

“Nothing captures human interest more than human tragedy.”
Source: Angels & Demons

“The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.”
Le Coq et l’Arlequin (1918)

Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)
Context: The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens — and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.

“Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.”
A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”
Notebook E (1945) edited by Edmund Wilson
Quoted, Notebooks

John MacQueen, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography vol. 26, s. n. Henryson, Robert.
Criticism

“The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.”
Source: Einstein's Dreams