Source: The Age of Innocence
The Art of Poetry - interview 1995 with Downing & Kunitz
The Death-Bed; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
20th century
Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 221
Context: Experience taken into the body, breathed-in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced.
To stand against the idea of the fallen world, a powerful and destructive idea overshadowing Western poetry. In that sense, there is no lost Eden, and God is the future. The child walled-up in our life can be given his growth. In this growth is our security.
“Their very names will breathe poetry forever.”
What It Means to Be a Poet in America (1926)
Context: There were three great Virginia poets in the very beginning — George Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson. “What!” you say. “We do not even know the names of their publishers. They were not poets!”
Well, how do you know? Did you ever really read them? What do you know about it? Their very names will breathe poetry forever.
“How art thou out of breath when thou hast breath
To say to me that thou art out of breath?”
Source: Romeo and Juliet
On the U.S.-Mexican border wall issue in “Poetry is Built for Compassion: An Interview with Juan Felipe Herrera” https://thi.ucsc.edu/poetry-built-compassion-interview-juan-felipe-herrera/ (Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz; 2019 Feb 27)
Marie Dressler, My Own Story as Told to Mildred Harrington (1934)
