“Poems get to the point where they are stronger than you are. They come up from some other depth and they find a place on the page.”
The Paris Review interview
Context: Poems get to the point where they are stronger than you are. They come up from some other depth and they find a place on the page. You can never find that depth again, that same kind of authority and voice. I might feel I would like to change something about them, but they’re still stronger than I am and I cannot.
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Ted Hughes 55
English poet and children's writer 1930–1998Related quotes
“Where words come out from the depth of truth”
Gitanjali http://www.spiritualbee.com/gitanjali-poems-of-tagore/ (1912)
Context: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
“If I knew where poems come from. I'd go there.”
'The Observer ' article March 24 1991
Republican Party Reptile (1987)
“You write poems
because you need
a place
where what isn’t may be”