English translation originally from "Subramaniya Bharathi" at Tamilnation.org, also quoted in "Colliding worlds of tradition and revolution" in The Hindu (13 December 2009) http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/colliding-worlds-of-tradition-and-revolution/article662079.ece
“He who has no poetry in himself will find poetry in nothing.”
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Joseph Joubert 253
French moralist and essayist 1754–1824Related quotes
“He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
Lectures on the English Poets http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16209/16209.txt (1818), Lecture I, "On Poetry in General"
Context: Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
'Phases of English Poetry' Hogarth Press (1928)
Phases in English Poetry (1928)
"Poetry and Grammar"
Lectures in America (1935)
Ingeborg Glier, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 184.
Praise
Ibid.
Essays and reviews, At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)
“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize”
“Poetry must find ways of breaking distance.”
Yo-Yo Boing! (Spanglish novel, 1998)
Context: If I respected languages like you do, I wouldn't write at all. El muro de Berlín fue derribado. Why can't I do the same? Desde la torre de Babel, las lenguas han sido siempre una forma de divorciarnos del resto de la humanidad. Poetry must find ways of breaking distance. I'm not reducing my audience. On the contrary, I'm going to have a bigger audience with the common markets — in Europe — in America. And besides, all languages are dialects that are made to break new grounds. I feel like Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio, and I even feel like Garcilaso forging a new language. Saludo al nuevo siglo, el siglo del nuevo lenguaje de América, y le digo adiós a la retórica separatista y a los atavismos.
“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.
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