Quotes about poem (764 quotes, page 4) | Quotes of famous people

“In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. Not only is any reference to a particular public or its representatives misleading, but even the concept of an "ideal" receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art, since all it posits is the existence and nature of man as such. Art, in the same way, posits man's physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his attentiveness. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Nirgends erweist sich einem Kunstwerk oder einer Kunstform gegenüber die Rücksicht auf den Aufnehmenden für deren Erkenntnis fruchtbar. Nicht genug, dass jede Beziehung auf ein bestimmtes Publikum oder dessen Repräsentanten vom Wege abführt, ist sogar der Begriff eines "idealen" Aufnehmenden in allen kunsttheoretischen Erörterungen vom Übel, weil diese lediglich gehalten sind, Dasein und Wesen des Menschen überhaupt vorauszusetzen. So setzt auch die Kunst selbst dessen leibliches und geistiges Wesen voraus—seine Aufmerksamkeit aber in keinem ihrer Werke. Denn kein Gedicht gilt dem Leser, kein Bild dem Beschauer, keine Symphonie der Hörerschaft.
The Task of the Translator (1920)

Art , Way , Nature

“A friend came over to the house
a few days ago and read one of my poems.
He came back today and asked to read the
same poem over again. After he finished
reading it, he said, "It makes me want to write poetry."”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

"Hey! This Is What It's All About"
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining Disaster

Reading , Housing

“Bittersweet creatures : So what is art, that it can enhance social abilities and transform the self? First of all, art is something that lasts and can spread to others. So although one can imagine a lover whispering an improvised poem into her lover’s ear, for the most part a poem will travel in time and space, and last beyond the moment of its conception.”

Keith Oatley (1939) Anglo-Canadian psychologist

" Changing our Minds http://peacecenter.berkeley.edu/greatergood/2009winter/Oatley653.php," originally published in Changing our Minds magazine.

Art , Travel , Imagination , Lovers

“I suppose that I am a very serious poet – except for satirical verse, which I have also been compelled to write, though much of it may be inferior to my more serious poems – perhaps because I am not playful enough by nature, and even my satirical or polemical verse is not entertaining.”

Michael Hamburger (1924–2007) British translator, poet, critic, memoirist and academic

Interview with Lidia Vianu http://lidiavianu.scriptmania.com/Michael%20Hamburger.htm

Nature

“They will explain themselves — as all poems should do without any comment.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to George Keats (1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

“There seems to be a general consensus of opinion among modern scholars that the Bhagavadgītā, as it now appears in the Epic, is not an original poem composed by a single hand, but an ancient work, rewritten and enlarged. But all are not agreed as to the history of the poem's composition.”

W. Douglas P. Hill (1884–1962) British Indologist

Source: The Bhagavadgītā (1973), p. 18. (12. The composition of the Bhagavadgītā)

History , Appearance

“The usual bad poem in somebody’s Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one’s teeth.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“William Carlos Williams”, p. 216
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Learning

“I have finally realized how rarely you will find a flawless woman, one who is simply perfect. No doubt there are many who seem quite promising, write a flowing hand, give you back a perfectly acceptable poem, and all in all do credit enough to the rank they have to uphold, but you know, if you insist on any particular quality, you seldom find one who will do. Each one is all too pleased with her own accomplishments, runs others down, and so on. While a girl is under the eye of her adoring parents and living a sheltered life bright with future promise, it seems men have only to hear of some little talent of hers to be attracted. As long as she is pretty and innocent, and young enough to have nothing else on her mind, she may well put her heart into learning a pastime that she has seen others enjoy, and in fact she may become quite good at it. And when those who know her disguise her weaknesses and advertise whatever passable qualities she may have so as to present them in the best light, how could anyone think ill of her, having no reason to suspect her of being other than she seems? But when you look further to see whether it is all true, I am sure you can only end up disappointed.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Spoken by Tō no Chūjō in Ch. 2: The Broom Tree (trans. Royall Tyler)
Tale of Genji

Life , Men , Disappointment , Girl

“These poems were written by someone I once was and who is so distant to me now that I scarcely recognize him anymore. They speak for a time and a feeling which of course has gone from me but for which I still have a close affection and kinship.”

Laurie Lee (1914–1997) British writer

Preface to Selected Poems, André Deutsch Ltd, London, 1983, ISBN 0233975039
Other Quotes

Feeling , Distant , Time

“Suppose, deep down, you suspect that you are dull, and your public works are a form of vengeance. You talk a good poem, and think by numbers. Once upon a time, you were interesting; then Mother died and you had to give it up.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"The Power Party" (p. 62)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

Thinking , Time

“An unromantic poem I mean to make
Of one who only lives for duty's sake.”

Henrik Ibsen Love's Comedy

Guldstad
Love's Comedy (1862)

“All poets face the same task to 'follow the prompts' and satisfactorily shape the amorphous sounds, rhythms, images or phrases by which a potential poem is recognised.”

Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) Irish poet, critic

Poetry Quotes

“The rhythm of a poem ceases the moment the feeling loses its intensity.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

What is a Poem - Endword - Selected Poems (1926)

Feeling

“Carthon, one of the poems, was translated into French as early as 1762 while the collected works followed suit in 1777. Diderot loved them. Voltaire parodied them. Ossianic plays, operas, and mimes were written. They influenced or attracted Mme. de Staël, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset. Napoleon became a fervent admirer after he had read the poems in the Italian translation by Cesarotti.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

Henry Okun, "Ossian in Painting", in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes vol. 30 (1967) p. 329.
Criticism

Love , Reading

“The novels and poems which proceed from writers in the grip of this barren pessimism are of the kind which make narrow moralists fume, and use words like "decadence"; the writers rejoice, because making narrow moralists (who are usually frightened people) hop with rage is a sign that they have hit a mark, and they do not understand how poor and easy a mark it is.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

People , Understanding , Rage

“The human mind is [a poet's] individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our [the readers'] minds too. There is no self-expression in [a poet's] poem, because once the poem is there the individual [poet] has disappeared. …there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

Literature

“The proper act of reading of a poem was not an act of passive submission but one of collaboration with its author.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

Drums of Morning, 1992

Reading

“America's first great surrealist artists were named Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, and Tex Avery. Their artistic medium was cartoon animation, though we must remember that cartoons of this era were seen not only by children but by a mixed audience, consisting mainly of adults. These men took — quite literally — the principles of surrealism and turned them into mass entertainment. As Fleischer's scantily clad Betty Boop ran through a phantasmagoric underground landscape to the driving beat of Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher," moviegoers of the Thirties saw surrealist dream-logic unfold more powerfully than in any experimental poem created in Greenwich Village. To this day the greatest moment of North American surrealism is probably Dumbo's drunken nightmare choreographed to the demonic oom-pah-pah of "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Walt Disney's 1941 movie. When the surrealist style was so quickly assimilated into mass-media comedy, what avant-garde poet could consider it sufficiently chic?”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"James Tate and American Surrealism," BBC Radio 3, published in Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998)
Essays

Men , Children , Dreams , Animals

“He wrote down everything he saw and heard, and most of his thoghts, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose. It could take him many hours to write in his diary a survey of one full day: everything was an experience, any noteworthy observation which some nameless person might make was a new vista, any insignificant piece of information was a new sunrise, any ordinary poem he read for the first time was the beginning of a new epoch like a flight around the globe; the world was multiform, magnificent and opulent, and he loved it.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Love , World , Time , Reading

“Really," said the poet, without enthusiasm.
"Mm—you say 'Really,' young man?" said the secretary. "That is undeniably a rather peculiar reply. Might I ask what you mean by that word?"
"I mean that I'm such an insignificant poet that it isn't worthwhile getting me to compose a poem," said Ólafur Kárason modestly.
The secretary gave the poet a stern and searching look and finally said, "I no longer understand young people nowadays. It's as if nothing serious or important makes any impression on young people any longer. The modern craze seems to be to squander money needlessly if possible. But luckily it isn't possible. Even you, young man, who are said to have a poetic bent, yes, and some say you even possess a modicum of intelligence, you just say 'Really' when you're invited to take part in a ceremony which is destined to revolutionize the religious, scientific, and moral life of the nation.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

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Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Life , Money , People , Search

“The so-called obscurity of modernist literature has, of course, a lot to do with the new stress on exegesis. When the overt meaning of a work can no longer be taken for granted, criticism is forced — or seems forced — to undertake the explication of the text of the work before doing anything else. But experience has shown us by now that the drift and shape of an "obscure" poem or novel can be grasped for the purposes of art without being "worked out." Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

"T.S. Eliot: A Book Review" (1950/1956), p. 244
1960s, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (1961)

Art , Literature , Success , Parting

“The poems I am writing at the moment will be much closer to your present way of thinking. I am trying to renew poetic style, but within a classical framework. On the other hand, I don't want to lapse into imitating others. Letter to Picasso 1918”

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) French poet

Way , Thinking

“The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth.”

Rachel Carson book The Sea Around Us

Chapter 6, Page 98 https://books.google.com/books?id=PvkDFTtW6f4C&&pg=PA98
The Sea Around Us (1951)

“Poetry is a subset of a Cosmos, which in itself, is a poem.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

“My "Poems" were written without a purpose, other than the expression of faiths and ideals strongly realized and emotions keenly felt. They were written for the joy of writing, and for the satisfaction of an irresistible impulse. It is my belief that it is not the business of art either to teach or to preach.”

Florence Earle Coates (1850–1927) American writer and poet

Written at Camp Elsinore, Upper St. Regis Lake, New York, June 24, 1898. From Book News, Aug 1898.

Faith , Art , Business , Joy

“…his book, Orpheus, or the Way to a Death Mask, of which he had said that he regretted not having written it as a poem.
And with dream-awakened eyes she saw all the beauty around her, saw the sea, felt the sun, and knew: she had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths.”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

Charlotte's 2th ending, written page in brush, related to JHM no. 4924v https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/Charlotte_Salomon_-_JHM_4924-02.jpg: 'Life? or Theater..', p. 822
Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Death , Books , World , Beauty

“A book of poems should have almost as many dedications as titles for the poet must always sing for some friend whether the friend knows it or not”

Harriet Monroe (1860–1936) American poet and editor

Dedication 'You and I' Macmillan, New York October 1914
Other Quotes

Books , Singing

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any ideal, neither of an angel in heaven, nor of a hero in a poem or novel, nor one that is dreamed up or imagined: rather shalt thou love a man as he is.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Du sollst dir kein Ideal machen, weder eines Engels im Himmel, noch eines Helden aus einem Gedicht oder Roman, noch eines selbstgeträumten oder fantasirten; sondern du sollst einen Mann lieben, wie er ist.
Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), “Athenaeum Fragments,” § 364

Love , Dreams , Angels , Imagination

“The relevant poems are Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's Essay on Man, Wordsworth's Excursion, Tennyson's In Memoriam.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 5: "The Romantic Reaction"

“A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Thursday

Literature

“I did not wish to protest against war. My object was to remember. I wanted people to find in my poems the truth of what it had been like to be an American infantry soldier. Now I see I was writing a memorial of those years, for the me I had known, who were silent.”

Louis Simpson (1923–2012) Jamaican poet

The Poetry of War ed. Ian Hamilton , London 1945
Other

War , People , Truth , Memory

“Hate and Fear are not wanted here,
Nor Toys nor Country Lovers,
Everything they took from my new poem book
But the flyleaf and the covers.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"A First Review"
Country Sentiment (1920)

Hate , Books , Fear , Lovers

“We do not write poems with ideas, but with words.”

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet

Ce n'est pas avec des idées qu'on fait des vers, c'est avec des mots.
A remark reported in Psychologie de l'art (1927) by Henri Delacroix, p. 93; as translated in Literary Impressionism (1973), Maria Elisabeth Kronegger, p. 77.
Observations

Idea

“[On inspiration]: I think it comes from anxiety. That is to say, either the mind or the body is already rather highly charged and in need of some kind of expression, some way to crystallize and relieve the pressure. And it seems to me that if you’re in that condition and an idea, an insight, an association occurs to you, then that energy is released through the expression of that insight or idea, and after the poem is written, you feel a certain resolution and calmness. Well, I won’t say a “momentary stay against confusion” (Robert Frost’s phrase) but that’s what I mean. I think it comes from that. You know, Bloom says somewhere that poetry is anxiety.”

A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) American poet

Paris Review interview (1996)

Way , Feeling , Idea , Thinking

“Richard Chase declares, "No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson." He blames the Victorian cult of little women for the fact that "two thirds of her work" is seriously flawed: "Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 637

Women , Friendship , Nature , Suffering

“An example: if I compose a picture using as objects a scrap of bark, a scrap of butterfly wing and a purely imaginary form, you probably won't recognise the bark, or the butterfly wing, and you'll say: 'What does this stand for? It is an abstract picture. No it's a representational picture'... There is no such thing as 'abstract', or 'concrete' either. There is a good picture and a bad picture. There is the picture that moves you and the picture that leaves you cold... A picture has a value in itself, like a musical score, like a poem.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote in Un Nouveau Realisme, la Couleur Pure et l'Object, Fernand Léger, Ms 1935
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1930's

Music

“Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say "The world in a verse,A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,"
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Arrival at the Waldorf"
Parts of a World (1942)

Love , Women , Men , World

“Writing poems is perhaps the loveliest deception
Later they'll make a picture or something, then go and drink wine”

Ataol Behramoğlu (1942) Turkish writer

"How Awful When Poetry Ages As It Is Read"
I've Learned Some Things (2008)

Drink , Wine

“I have already said that a thing which 'exists in a person's head' and nowhere else is alternatively called an imaginary thing. The actual making of the tune is therefore alternatively called the making of an imaginary tune. This is a case of creation, just as much as the making of a plan or a disturbance, and for the same reasons, which it would be tedious to repeat. Hence the making of a tune is an instance of imaginative creation. The same applies to the making of a poem, or a picture, or any other work of art.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: The Principles of Art (1938), p. 134

Art , Imagination , Personality

“My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.”

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) British poet

"Some notes on my poetry" Collected Poems (1957)

Life

“"Freedom of speech is the freedom to shout Long Live Kim Il Sung": This has been a commonplace here since Kim Su-yŏng’s famous poem to that effect in 1960. It’s not to be taken too literally or narrowly; one gets the larger meaning. But it’s not that much larger. When dissidents and demonstrators called for freedom of speech in the past it was usually nationalist, anti-American and pro-North speech they had in mind.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

Freedom , Past

“I have a faculty of memorizing any song or poem as I hear it, many, especially the old Scotch and Irish ballads I heard my grandmother sing when I was but a child.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Robert W. Gordon (February 15, 1926)
Letters

Singing

“Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate?”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Reality

“You either do it quietly and describe the Indian community in half a dozen poems or you think sod it, and go all out. The most Indian way I could think of was to do monologues and voices.”

Daljit Nagra (1966) British poet, teacher and broadcaster

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1992990,00.html

Way , Communication , Thinking

“No aspect of a poem is more singular, more unique, than its rhythm.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

'The Sounds of Poetry' Farrar,Strauss & Giroux 1998
The Sounds of Poetry 1998

“What should be most significant to us are not physical artifacts, but the meaning they embody. …whenever we create paintings, songs, poems, books, computer programs—or ideas in the minds of children—we do something of this sort.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Children , Books , Idea , Painting

“…we were not aware of this and the seditious character of the poem (Balagtas' Florante and Laura) until Epifanio de los Santos discovered and pointed them out”

Epifanio de los Santos (1871–1928) Filipino politician

Leopoldo Y. Babes "A brief survey of Iloko literature from the beginnings to its present development, with a bibliography of works pertaining to the Iloko people and their language" Manila Oriental Co. 1924, p. 56-57.
BALIW

“This poem [The Ancient Mariner] would not have taken so well if it had been called “The Old Sailor.””

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

The Ancient Mariner
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XV - Titles and Subjects

“During the last quarter of a century all the authority associated with the function of spiritual guidance … has seeped down into the lowest publications. … Between a poem by Valéry and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature’s spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

“Morality and literature,” p. 164
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

Marriage , Beauty , Girl , Literature

“The more I reflect on it, the more I must admire how completely nature had taught him; how completely he was devoted to his work, to the task of his life, and content to let all pass by unheeded that had not relation to this. It is a singular fact, for example, that though a man of such openness and clearness, he had never, I believe, read three pages of Burns's poems. Not even when all about him became noisy and enthusiastic, I the loudest, on that matter, did he feel it worth while to renew his investigation of it, or once turn his face towards it. The poetry he liked (he did not call it poetry) was truth, and the wisdom of reality. Burns, indeed, could have done nothing for him. As high a greatness hung over his world as over that of Burns — the ever-present greatness of the Infinite itself. Neither was he, like Burns, called to rebel against the world, but to labor patiently at his task there, uniting the possible with the necessary to bring out the real, wherein also lay an ideal.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Life , Wisdom , Truth , World

“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Humane Literacy".
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

Men

“A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Elective Affinities

Bk. II, Ch. 7
Elective Affinities (1809)

Teachers' Day , Feeling , Nature , Teachers

“Contrastive stress is very important in English, as poems are full of invisible italicised contrasts of this kind.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

introduction-John Hollander ed.'Committed to Memory' Riverhead Books New York 1996

“I delay typing as long as possible. When I read a poem in longhand I'm hearing it, when in typescript I'm reading it. A poem can appear finished just because of the cleanness of the typescript.”

Mark Strand (1934–2014) Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

Paris Review Interview (1998)

Appearance , Reading

“I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something--a sculptor he would have been, no doubt--who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life. A pretty nasty shock for the chap, of course.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Right Ho, Jeeves

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Life , School , Girl , Learning

“The excursus upon the origin of Odysseus’ scar is not basically different from the many passages in which a newly introduced character, or even a newly appearing object or implement, though it be in the thick of a battle, is described as to its nature and origin; or in which, upon the appearance of a god, we are told where he last was, what he was doing there, and by what road he reached the scene; indeed, even the Homeric epithets seem to me in the final analysis to be traceable to the same need for an externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses. Here is the scar, which comes up in the course of the narrative; and Homer’s feeling simply will not permit him to see it appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; it must be set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero’s boyhood. … To be sure, the aesthetic effect thus produced was soon noticed and thereafter consciously sought; but the more original cause must have lain in the basic impulse of the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but it seldom takes place wordlessly: Polyphemus talks to Odysseus; Odysseus talks to the suitors when he begins to kill them; Hector and Achilles talk at length, before battle and after; and no speech is so filled with anger or scorn that the particles which express logical and grammatical connections are lacking or out of place.”

Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 5

God , Feeling , Nature , Sense

“The person who wrote the poem can tell you more about the poem than anyone else.”

David Yezzi (1966) American poet

Interview with Ernest Hibert (2006)

Personality

“Reciting a poem aloud, you are not like an actor, rather you come to understand, then to be, the voice of the poem itself.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

Understanding

“…I simply don’t want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

of not wanting to write a preface for his first volume of verse, The Rage for the Lost Penny (1940); “A Note on Poetry”, p. 47
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Life

“The essays in simulation of [Paul] Eluard and [Andre] Breton, Breton's recent poem-objects, the latest images of Rene Magritte, the "method" of the latest sculpture of Picasso and the theoretic and pictorial activity of Salvador Dali prove this need of concrete materialisation in current reality, of giving objective value on the real plane to the delirious unknown world of our irrational experiences. Against the remembrance of dreams and the virtual and impossible images of purely receptive states, "that can only be recounted", there are the physical facts of "objective" irrationality, with which one can already actually wound oneself.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 14-15

World , Dreams , Reality

“Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 624

Dreams , Study , Help

“His most celebrated poems are, of course, the historical-satirical ballads (A or even X certificate) in which a person or period is "hit off", in the sense both of being preserved and hit for six.”

William Plomer (1903–1973) South African-British writer

Philip Larkin, in The Guardian, June 10, 1960.
Criticism

Sense , Personality

“Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around — not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Way

“One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Writers on Themselves (1986)

Life

“The first part of "The Double Axe" was written during the war and finished a year before the war ended, and it bears the scars; but the poem is not primarily concerned with that grim folly. Its burden, as of some previous work of mine, is to present a philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

Preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948)

Love , Hate , War , People

“A poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation in one of its terms. The signiﬁcance of a part may be greatly modified or even in extreme cases completely reversed by later and larger parts and by the whole.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Texts from Housman”, p. 21
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Parting

“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.

Art

“The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas—the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, “That was a good stroke.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 155
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

People , Animals

“Some of Mr. Gregory’s poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and casual smartness, the flat fashionable irony, meaningless because it proceeds from a frame of reference whose amorphous superiority is the most definite thing about it—they are the trademark not simply of a magazine but of a class.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Town Mouse, Country Mouse”, p. 70
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Fashion , Appearance

“[He] had invented a pinball machine. When we saw it, we said, George! This is not a pinball machine alone. This is the poem of a pinball machine, the essence made delicately concrete, and so forth.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"This Is a Story about My Friend George, the Toy Inventor"

“Learning is not doing; it is reflecting on doing. T. S. Eliot writes in one of his poems, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” Reflection is about getting the meaning.”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

Source: Managers Not MBAs (2005), p. 254

Learning

“There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Lathe of Heaven

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 11 (Orr)

Bird , Reality , Universe

“I am very interested in memorization which is the process of incorporating a poem, so, I would say the kind of poetry I write is the kind that emphasises the physical qualities of the words.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

WPFW-FM inteview with Grace Cavalieri 1995/96 season

“We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experience, because he himself re-creates them.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

Part 1: "The Creative Mind", §9 ( p. 20 http://books.google.com/books?id=TeHXAAAAMAAJ&q=%22We+re-make+nature+by+the+act+of+discovery+in+the+poem+or+in+the+theorem+And+the+great+poem+and+the+deep+theorem+are+new+to+every+reader+and+yet+are+his+own+experience+because+he+himself+re-creates+them%22&pg=PA20#v=onepage)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

Nature

“Bullett's poem criticising Cosmo Gordon Lang for his speech on Edward VIII's abdictation. Quoted in Ross McKibben, Classes and Cultures 1918–51, (2000), Oxford University Press, also in Anthony Jay, Lend Me Your Ears:Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations,(2010), Oxford”

Gerald Bullett (1893–1958) British writer

Quotes , Universe

“A poem, a genuine one, does not need to fear the world; it stands up to it, even when a bell rings and an unexpected guest arrives to tell us, while the same coffee is still in our cups, of his fourteen years in captivity…”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Sketchbook 1946-1949

World , Fear , Coffee

“Stevens’s poetry makes one understand how valuable it can be for a poet to write a great deal. Not too much of that great deal, ever, is good poetry; but out of quantity can come practice, naturalness, accustomed mastery, adaptations and elaborations and reversals of old ways, new ways, even—so that the poet can put into the poems, at the end of a lifetime, what the end of a lifetime brings him. Stevens has learned to write at will, for pleasure; his methods of writing, his ways of imagining, have made this possible for him as it is impossible for many living poets—Eliot, for instance. Anything can be looked at, felt about, meditated upon, so Stevens can write about anything; he does not demand of his poems the greatest concentration, intensity, dramatic immediacy, the shattering and inexplicable rightness the poet calls inspiration.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 65
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Pleasure , Way , Imagination , Understanding

“His background is not simply the Abbey School of Dunfermline (where he is reputed to have been a schoolmaster), but the surrounding Scottish countryside and community to which he belonged. His wisdom – and his poems are very wise about life – evidently came from his having lived long and profoundly as a member of that whole Scottish community.”

Robert Henryson (1425–1506) Scottish makar (poet)

John Speirs, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) p. 85.
Criticism

Life , Wisdom , School , Communication

“Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love. In a manner evident and yet mysterious, the poem or the drama or the novel seizes upon our imaginings. We are not the same when we put down the work as we were when we took it up. To borrow an image from another domain: he who has truly apprehended a painting by Cézanne will thereafter see an apple or a chair as he had not seen them before. Great works of art pass through us like storm-winds, flinging open the doors of perception, pressing upon the architecture of our beliefs with their transforming powers. We seek to record their impact, to put our shaken house in its new order. Through some primary instinct of communion we seek to convey to others the quality and force of our experience. We would persuade them to lay themselves open to it. In this attempt at persuasion originate the truest insights criticism can afford.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1960), Ch. 1.

Love , Art , Imagination , Painting

“"There's nothing new under the sun": that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun. And the poem you created is also new under the sun, since no one wrote it down before you. And all your readers are also new under the sun, since those who lived before you couldn't read your poem. And that cypress under which you're sitting hasn't been growing since the dawn of time. It came into being by way of another cypress similar to yours, but not exactly the same.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

The Poet and the World (1996)

Way , Time , Reading , Sun

““Why don’t you leave?” the woman in the poem asked herself. We need to stop asking that question and begin to understand why she is staying. From understanding comes the ability to reach, to touch and to change. And if we help even just one woman to take that courageous first step out of violence, we have achieved a lot.”

Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark (1972) Crown Princess of Denmark

Conference on domestic violence, http://www.maryfonden.dk/en/washington-world-conference-speech (27 February 2012)

Courage , Understanding , Question , Change

“Seasonal Fires: Selected and New Poems (Seven Stories Press, NYC, 2006); also published as Seasonal Fires: Selected and New Poems (Umuzi, Random House, South Africa, 2006)”

Ingrid de Kok (1951) South African writer

Works

Housing , Season

“The line is a way of thinking in poetry, by poetry.. it paces the poem.”

Edward Hirsch (1950)

'Five points' vol 4 no 2 Georgia State University Press Winter 2000

Way , Thinking

“A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad — and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950 [p. 171]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

People , Success

“I know that any discussion of the relation of this poem to its historical materials is, in one perspective, irrelevant to its value; and it could be totally accurate as history and still not worth a dime as a poem. I am trying to write a poem, not a history, and therefore have no compunction about tampering with non-essential facts. But poetry is more than fantasy and is committed to the obligation of trying to say something, however obliquely, about the human condition. Therefore, a poem dealing with history is no more at liberty to violate what the writer takes to be the spirit of his history than it is at liberty to violate what he takes to be the nature of the human heart. What he takes those things to be is, of course, his ultimate gamble.”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

Foreword, Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices — A New Version (1979)

History , Nature , Heart

“In fact, my art generally nauseated me. Often, when I wanted to set down a poem on an uncontaminated piece of paper, I′d start feeling sick and I did actually throw up in front of many drawings. I tremble all over in front of each picture-poem and before every action I would swallow a jar of pressed vine vermin. Time and again I strove for a kind of non-art, and time and again I failed, like a chimpanzee wanting to throw away a banana without peeling it. My disgust at producing art naturally atracted collectors, and ocassionaly photographers.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 238 (2002)

Art , Feeling , Nature , Time

“Vito Acconci’s extraordinary career—poetry, art, architecture: a sort of triathlon of the arts—began in the Bronx, where as an aspiring author of seven years he wrote stories about cowboys and athletes. At his Catholic college, he published sexy stuff about priests and nuns that got the school magazine banned for three issues running. He went on to write fiction in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But when he came back to New York in the early ’60s, something changed, and he began writing poems. Highly conceptual constructions, they did not tell stories, express feelings, or evoke a fictional world. They were not representational. Maybe you could call them presentational: this is a word, this is a sentence, you are reading.”

Shelley Jackson (1963) a writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments

Shelley Jackson, in: Shelley Jackson talks with Vito Acconci http://www.believermag.com/issues/200612/?read=interview_acconci, in: The Believer, Nr. 12. 2006.

World , School , Art , Feeling

“In the old romanticism the poem was an uncommon effect of common experience on the poet. All interest in the poem centred in this mysterious capacity of the poet for overfeeling, for being overaffected. In Poe the old romanticism ended and the new romanticism began. That is, the interest was broadened to include the reader: the end of the poem was pushed ahead a stage, from the poet to the reader. The uncommon effect of experience on the poet became merely incidental to the uncommon effect which he might have on the reader. Mystery was replaced by science; inspiration by psychology.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"What is a Poem?" from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

Science

“My uncle [mother’s brother] wrote rather twee books of memoirs in the period between the two World Wars. They’d be deeply embarrassing to read today. In the 19th century my mother’s family were involved with the Pre-Raphaelites, and a direct ancestor of mine was Lady Byron’s lawyer, who advised her to leave the poet because of her husband’s affair with his half-sister. A much earlier ancestor on my mother’s side was chaplain to Richard Corbet, Bishop of Oxford, who wrote the poem ‘Farewell Rewards and Fairies’. In his ‘Brief Lives’ Aubrey describes them getting drunk together in the cellars of Christchurch, Oxford.”

Edward Lucie-Smith (1933) British art critic, writer and curator

From an interview http://rimbaud.org.uk/q-lucie-smith.html

War , Books , World , Family

“If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.”

Paul Muldoon (1951) Irish poet

Harper's, September 1999.

Chance

“It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

How to Save Your Own Life (1977)

Love

“He has a clear style and has had much courage – as in his poem "Babi Yar", a memorial to the Jews murdered by the Nazis. But he is no more than a talented poetaster – which is quite obvious to all but Western journalists – and it would be foolish to consider him as more than a skilful publicist.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017) Russian poet, film director, teacher

Martin Seymour-Smith, Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975) vol. 4, pp. 240-1.
Criticism

Courage , Memory , Baby

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”

Robert Ardrey book African Genesis

African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man (1961)

Peace , Dreams , Angels , Star

“As Arp and I are sitting in the large living room of my house on Central Park in November 1958, we try again and again to understand the significance of Dada for ourselves and for others. Many elements surfaced in me and in the 'Fantastic Prayers' [his poems Phantastische Gebete, Zurich 1916] at the same time; resistance against the 'civilization' we live in, fury about a purely factual world which leaves out personality and thus creative power, the means of irony and underlying religiousness. Ball turned religious during the times of dadaism, Arp is a religious person today, and I have always been one, without wanting to realize it, perhaps without knowing it.”

Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–1974) German poet

Quote in his 'Preface' by Richard Huelsenbeck, New York, November 1958, in Phantastische Gebete; published by Arche Verlag, Zurich, 1960 (transl. by Johannes Beilharz, 2000)

World , Understanding , Time , Housing

“Emerson writes in his Journal that all men try their hands at poetry, but few know which their poems are. The poets are not those who write poems, but those who know which of the things they write are poems.”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

Quote from a 1962 essay by Andre; as quoted in ' Objects Are What We Aren't' https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/26/objects-are-what-we-arent/, by Andy Battaglia; The Parish Review, February 26, 2015

Men