“Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.”

—  Jorge Luis Borges

"The Divine Comedy" (1977)
Context: Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song." by Jorge Luis Borges?
Jorge Luis Borges photo
Jorge Luis Borges213
Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator… 1899–1986

Related quotes

“Poetry may be written on paper, but it’s an oral art. A good poem satisfies the ear. It creates a story or picture that grabs you.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

Quoted in 'Venerable Poets :Words to Pop Music beat 'by Cynthia Wolfe Boyton.

Edward Hirsch photo

“For most of history poetry has been an oral art, it retains the vestiges of orality, an experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds.”

Edward Hirsch (1950)

How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)

John Ruskin photo

“We are to remember, in the first place, that the arrangement of colours and lines is an art analogous to the composition of music, and entirely independent of the representation of facts.”

John Ruskin book The Stones of Venice

Volume II, chapter VI, section 42.
The Stones of Venice (1853)
Context: We are to remember, in the first place, that the arrangement of colours and lines is an art analogous to the composition of music, and entirely independent of the representation of facts. Good colouring does not necessarily convey the image of anything but itself. It consists of certain proportions and arrangements of rays of light, but not in likeness to anything. A few touches of certain greys and purples laid by a master's hand on white paper will be good colouring; as more touches are added beside them, we may find out that they were intended to represent a dove's neck, and we may praise, as the drawing advances, the perfect imitation of the dove's neck. But the good colouring does not consist in that imitation, but in the abstract qualities and relations of the grey and purple.

William Morris photo

“History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

John Miles Foley photo

“The default designation of poetry has become written poetry. That's why we have to prefix the adjective "oral," because the unmodified noun no longer covers anything but written poetry. That's also why we resort to other unwieldy phrases to pigeonhole events and phenomena that our cultural proclivities have silently eliminated from consideration. Thus a "poetry reading" describes a performance (from a published text, of course) before a well-behaved, often academic audience. Thus "spoken-word poetry"—so redundant from a historical perspective—identifies voiced verbal art, verse that is lifted off the page and into the world of presence and experience.”

John Miles Foley (1947–2012) American literary scholar

How to Read an Oral Poem (2002), p. 30

Adolf Hitler photo

“The art of reading consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting non essentials.”

Adolf Hitler book Mein Kampf

Source: Mein Kampf

“Art has a breadth which encompasses all the forms of creativeness, in drama, poetry, dance, fine arts, music, and literature. Art is not the picture you see before you. Pictures are the products of art.”

Harvey Dwight Dash (1924–2002) American art educator

[Pictures Called Products Of Art., The Record, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harvey_Dwight_Dash_(1924-2002)_in_The_Record_of_Hackensack,_New_Jersey_on_5_November_1959.png, November 5, 1959, Harvey Dwight Dash]
Quote

Vladimir Lenin photo

“You are known among us as a protector of the arts so you must remember that, of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Из всех искусств важнейшим для нас является кино.
Conversation with A.V.Lunacharsky (April 1919); also quoted in A Concise History of the Cinema: Before 1940 (1971) by Peter Cowie, p. 137, Complete Works of V.I.Lenin - 5th Edition - Vol. 44. - p. 579.
1910s

“Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.”

Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990) Canadian eductor

Source: Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977), p. 362

Paul Klee photo

“First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote of Klee (Munich, c. 1910); as cited by Gualtieri Di San Lazzaro, Klee, Praeger, New York, 1957, p. 16
Klee was married, had a young son then and did the housework, living in an suburb of Munich
1903 - 1910

Related topics