Source: The Magician's Land
“I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”
—
F. Scott Fitzgerald
,
book
This Side of Paradise
Source: This Side of Paradise
Last update June 3, 2021.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald 411
American novelist and screenwriter 1896–1940Related quotes
“I may be down, but never out. An infantry officer can do anything.”
Colin Powell
(1937) Former U.S. Secretary of State and retired four-star general
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“Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need”
Madeleine L'Engle
(1918–2007) American writer
The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle (2005)
Context: Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.
James C. Collins
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Simon to Clary, pg. 217
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)
“I wanted to find out why Shelley could write better-sounding poetry than I.”
Peter Ladefoged
(1925–2006) British phonetician
Los Angeles Times (1970); on why he chose to pursue phonetics.
Margaret Atwood
(1939) Canadian writer
On Writing Poetry (1995)
Context: I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time. Wordsworth was sort of right when he said, "Poets in their youth begin in gladness/ But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness." Except that sometimes poets skip the gladness and go straight to the despondency. Why is that? Part of it is the conditions under which poets work — giving all, receiving little in return from an age that by and large ignores them — and part of it is cultural expectation — "The lunatic, the lover and the poet," says Shakespeare, and notice which comes first. My own theory is that poetry is composed with the melancholy side of the brain, and that if you do nothing but, you may find yourself going slowly down a long dark tunnel with no exit. I have avoided this by being ambidextrous: I write novels too. But when I find myself writing poetry again, it always has the surprise of that first unexpected and anonymous gift.
Rachel Carson
(1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist
Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952); also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 91
Context: The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
Aphorism 7
Les Caractères (1688), Des Ouvrages de l'Esprit
Context: There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!