Quotes about poetry
page 12

“It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.”

Borís Pasternak (1890–1960) Russian writer

Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series (1963) edited by George Plimpton.

Life

“The headlands and the hedges were so fresh and wonderful, so gay with the dawn of the world. Tarry never tired looking at these ordinary things as he tired of the Mass and of religion. In a dim way he felt that he was not a Christian. In the god of Poetry he found a God more important to him than Christ. His god had never accepted Christ.”

Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967) poet

p10
Prose, Tarry Flynn (1948)

God, World, Religion, Way

“A filmed play like this doesn't offer the sensual enjoyment that movies can offer, but you don't go to it for that; you go for O'Neill's crude, prosaic virtuosity, which is also pure American poetry, and for the kind of cast that rarely gathers for a stage production. […] Larry, a self-hating alcoholic, is a weak man and a windbag, but Ryan brings so much understanding to Larry's weakness that the play achieves new dimensions. Ryan becomes O'Neill for us; he has O'Neill's famous "tragic handsomeness" and at the end, when Larry is permanently "iced" — that is, stripped of illusion — we can see that this is the author's fantasy of himself […] Fredric March interprets Harry Hope with so much quiet tenderness that when Harry regains his illusions and we see March's muscles tone up, we don't know whether to smile for the character or the actor.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"The Iceman Cometh," pp. 353-354
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Hate, Alcohol, Smile, Hope

“His chapters inspire me with more enthusiasm than even poetry itself. And the noble canon, with what true chivalrous feeling he confines his beautiful expressions of sorrow to the death of the gallant and high-bred knight, of whom it was a pity to see the fall, such was his loyalty to his king, pure faith to his religion, hardihood towards his enemy, and fidelity to his lady-love! – Ah, benedicite! how he will mourn over the fall of such a pearl of knighthood, be it on the side he happens to favour, or on the other. But, truly, for sweeping from the face of the earth some few hundreds of villain churls, who are born but to plough it, the high-born and inquisitive historian has marvellous little sympathy.”

Jean Froissart (1337–1405) French writer

Claverhouse, in Walter Scott's Old Mortality (1816), ch. 35.
Criticism

Love, Death, Faith, Religion

“Most poetry involves rhythmically structured or patterned language, avoiding what might be called 'a singing line.”

Jan Zwicky (1955) Canadian philosopher

The Details interview with Jay Ruzesky (Winter 2008)

Singing

“Degas was discussing poetry with Mallarmé; "It isn't ideas I'm short of… I've got too many", said Degas. "But Degas," replied Mallarmé, "you can't make a poem with ideas. … You make it with words.”

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet

From Degas, Manet, Morisot by Paul Valéry (trans. David Paul), Princeton University Press, 1960.
Observations

Idea

“In an age of democracy and of peaceful or warlike communion among all parts of humanity, philosophy, like poetry and politics, must be prophetic. The content of its prophecy is a vision of how it is that we may respond, right now and with the instruments at hand, to the experience of being lost in a void that is made up of time, into the beginning and end of which we cannot see, and that is indifferent to our concerns. It is a prophecy of the path of our unchaining and of our ascent in a world of time, in which we remain always bound to death and forever denied insight into the ultimate nature of reality…. No philosopher or philosophical tradition in the last two centuries has had a monopoly on this prophecy. It is everywhere.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 27

Death, Age, World, Peace

“The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma - human or divine - can deminish or demean. Indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.”

John Fowles book The Ebony Tower

The Ebony Tower (1974)

“Settle in your mind, that no sermon is worth much in which the Lord is not the principal speaker. There may be poetry, refinement, historic truth, moral truth, pathos, and all the charms of rhetoric; but all will be lost, for the purposes of preaching, if the word of the Lord is not the staple of the discourse.”

John Hall (1829–1898) Presbyterian pastor from Northern Ireland in New York, died 1898

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 477.

Truth

“I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Interview in The Review, published by Ian Hamilton (1972)

Thinking

“If you like poetry let it be first-rate; Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (if you will, though I don't admire him), Scott, Byron, Camp[b]ell, Wordsworth, and Southey. Now don't be startled at the names of Shakespeare and Byron. Both these were great men, and their works are like themselves. You will know how to choose the good and avoid the evil; the finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting, you will never wish to read them over twice.”

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) English novelist and poet

Letter to Ellen Nussey, 4 July 1834.
The letters of Charlotte Brontë (edited by Margaret Smith), Vol. I: 1829–1847, p. 130

Men, Evil, Reading

“Poetry must be read to be poetry. It may be that one reader is all that I deserve. If this is so, I want that reader to be you.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

Reading

“I can tell you I wrote every single word in this [her first children's] book -- in English and Spanish. I've been writing poetry and stories since I was a kid. And I am a songwriter. But you have limitations when you are a songwriter.... It was really a luxury to have 31 pages to expound upon.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

The Chicago Tribune (October 16, 2005)
2007, 2008

Children, Books

“If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.”

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

“Poetry in a Dry Season”, p. 36
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Success

“Never mind failures; they are quite natural, they are the beauty of life, these failures. What would life be without them? It would not be worth having if it were not for struggles. Where would be the poetry of life? Never mind the struggles, the mistakes. I never heard a cow tell a lie, but it is only a cow—never a man. So never mind these failures, these little backslidings; hold the ideal a thousand times, and if you fail a thousand times, make the attempt once more.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Life, Lie, Beauty, Failure

“It is to be hoped—I mean, I hope—that the poetry I have been writing since 1992 squares up to, takes the measure of, weighs up, the violent evasions and stock affronts of the oligarchy of fraud. I don't, even so, write poems to be polemical; I write to create a being of beautiful energy.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

A matter of timing: The Guardian, Saturday 21 September 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview28/print

Beauty, Hope, Fraud

“In televisionland we are all sophisticated enough now to realize that every statistic has an equal and opposite statistic somewhere in the universe. It is not a candidate's favorite statistic per se that engages us, but the assurance with which he can use it.
We are testing the candidates for self-confidence, for "Presidentiality" in statistical bombardment. It doesn't really matter if their statistics be homemade. What settles the business is the cool with which they are dropped.
And so, as the second half hour treads the decimaled path toward the third hour, we become aware of being locked in a tacit conspiracy with the candidates. We know their statistics go to nothing of importance, and they know we know, and we know they know we know.
There is total but unspoken agreement that the "debate," the arguments which are being mustered here, are of only the slightest importance.
As in some primitive ritual, we all agree — candidates and onlookers — to pretend we are involved in a debate, although the real exercise is a test of style and manners. Which of the competitors can better execute the intricate maneuvers prescribed by a largely irrelevant ritual?
This accounts for the curious lack of passion in both performers. Even when Ford accuses Carter of inconsistency, it is done in a flat, emotionless, game-playing style. The delivery has the tuneless ring of an old press release from the Republican National Committee. Just so, when Carter has an opportunity to set pulses pounding by denouncing the Nixon pardon, he dances delicately around the invitation like a maiden skirting a bog.
We judge that both men judge us to be drained of desire for passion in public life, to be looking for Presidents who are cool and noninflammable. They present themselves as passionless technocrats using an English singularly devoid of poetry, metaphor and even coherent forthright declaration.
Caught up in the conspiracy, we watch their coolness with fine technical understanding and, in the final half hour, begin asking each other for technical judgments. How well is Carter exploiting the event to improve our image of him? Is Ford's television manner sufficiently self-confident to make us sense him as "Presidential"?
It is quite extraordinary. Here we are, fully aware that we are being manipulated by image projectionists, yet happily asking ourselves how obligingly we are submitting to the manipulation. It is as though a rat running a maze were more interested in the psychologist's charts on his behavior than in getting the cheese at the goal line.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"And All of Us So Cool" (p.340)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

Life, Men, Behavior, Exercises

“The history of English poetry in verse in the story of the exhaustion of the effects to be obtained from rhyme and meter of the exploitation of a mine in which the most lodes have at last given out.”

F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet

Otherworld Cadences (1920)

History

“Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Speech at the University of Kansas at Lawrence http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/RFK-Speeches/Remarks-of-Robert-F-Kennedy-at-the-University-of-Kansas-March-18-1968.aspx (18 March 1968)

Life, Wisdom, Marriage, Children

“The genuinely innovatory, the truly 'experiential' poetry is always firmly rooted in the achievement of the past.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

A Proper Gentleman, 1977

Past

“Why won't the king of Denmark leave us our names? We have done nothing against him. We deserve no less respect than he does. My forefathers were kings of land and sea... Our skalds composed poetry and told stories in the language of King Óðinn himself, who came from Ásgarður when Europe still spoke the language of slaves.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Snæfríður
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part III: Fire in Copenhagen

Sea

“… the fact is, they are sculptures, since they show the relationship of object to object and that is the idea and purpose of a sculpture. I’ve got nothing against ‘poetry,’ but it’s only resonance and tempo. Each of my works is perhaps also indeed a poetic sculpture. It’s not that I think it’s a bad word, poetry, but I’m not a poet, since a poet is concerned with the relationship of human beings to human beings.”

Lawrence Weiner (1942) American artist

Gerti Fietzek, Gregor Stemmrich. Having been said: writings & interviews of Lawrence Weiner, 1968-2003, Hatje Cantz, 2004. p. 158

Idea, Thinking

“I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.”

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

On completing a long novel, New York Times (7 April 1968)

Time

“Poetry is the greatest literature, and pleasure in poetry is the greatest of literary pleasures. It is also the least easy to attain and there are some people who never do attain it.”

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1862–1933) British Liberal statesman

Recreation (1919)

People, Pleasure, Literature

“The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.”

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

The New York Times (16 December 1969)

“When Poetry thus keeps its place as the handmaiden of piety, it shall attain not a poor perishable wreath, but a crown that fadeth not away.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

From the Preface to A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists, (c 1779)
General sources

“Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 5, p. 138

Sense

“I fancy all distinctively poetical language ought to be banned and the poetry come out of the quality of the idea and the intensity or passion with which it is expressed.”

Roger Fry (1866–1934) English artist and art critic

Letter to R. C. Trevelyan , September 7, 1932
Other Quotes

Idea, Passion

“Nevertheless I like being in Norway [to escape the Nazi threat Schwitters fled to Norway, c. 1937], for it is a country of unparalleled beauty... I paint landscapes and portraits, model portrait, glue and paint abstract pictures and glue abstract plastic art; besides, I write poetry in German... What distresses me most of all is that I cannot live in my 'Merzraum' [a sculptured studio-space, Schwitters had built in Germany in the 1920's, but bomb-damaged in the war] and that it may be given up to destruction. For that reason I ask you once more, can you keep your ear to the ground again, to see if anyone in America is willing to give me an opportunity to shape a three-dimensional room?”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

In a letter to w:Galka Scheyer, 24 July 1937; as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, p. 41.
1930s
Source: http://www.sprengel-museum.de/bilderarchiv/sprengel_deutsch/fotos/merzbau1933_530.jpg

War, Beauty, Art, Painting

“Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

Pt. I, sec. 6, "The Effect of Poetry Explained"
The Philosophy of Style (1852)

Law, Nature

“For the translator of poetry, there is no activity that brings you into a closer, more intimate contact with language, both the second language and your own language, which translation allows you to experience freshly. Of course, translation is the impossible art which is why it attracts often the best minds, at least those driven by difficulty. The best metaphor I know for translation is from my friend Eamon Grennan, who translated the poems of Leopardi. It's like walking in a clear mountain stream, looking at colorful stones in the water. You find one so gorgeous, you put it in your pocket, take it home and put it on a shelf. In the morning you are surprised that the stone looks so dull and without luster. You have the stone, but you have removed it from the water of its home language so it has lost its luster.”

Billy Collins (1941) American poet

Interview with Kritya: In the Name of Poetry

Art, Color, Home, Mountain

“Poetry, the noble brotherhood who speak in tones of harmony, grandeur & pathos.”

James Grant Wilson (1832–1914) Union Army general

Preface to Poets & Poetry of Scotland Vol 1 , Blackie & Son , Edinburgh 1876

“…“progress”, in poetry at least, comes not so much from digesting the last age as from rejecting it altogether (or, rather, from eating a little and leaving a lot), and…the world’s dialectic is a sort of neo-Hegelian one in which one progresses not by resolving contradictions but by ignoring them.”

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

“From That Island”, p. 30
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Age, World

“As I grew older the poetic surround becomes more important. I realize that the 'poetic attention' was more important to me than poetry was. The 'poetic attention' being a kind of longing without the desire to posess.”

Don McKay (1942) Canadian poet

Other quotes

“In the street the rain was little more than a fine mist which softened the outlines of the houses and even lent a touch of poetry to a neighbourhood unlikely to evoke tender emotions. He raised his eyes to a roofline bristling with television aerials, lowered them again to windows still blank before the evening lights were lit.”

Anita Brookner (1928–2016) British novelist and art historian.

Making Things Better (2002)

Light, Housing

“Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together in a single imaginery being circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.”

Francisco De Goya (1746–1828) Spanish painter and printmaker (1746–1828)

the announcement in the paper of 6. Feb. 1799 was necessary because Goya was unable to find regular bookshops to sell the Capricho-prints. That year 300 sets were printed, which meant 24.000 prints!! - without the mis-prints and proof-prints.
The Caprichos was the name of a serie of eigthy prints that Goya entitled 'Los Caprichos'; Goya made them in a combination of regular etching & aquatint technique. Etching gave lines by scratching with needles in the copper-plate. Aquatint gave fields of flat watercolor wash, a uniform tone composed of tiny grains and speckles rather than lines (as Robert Hughes explains) in the same book, p. 176-177/207-208)
1790s, Goya's announcement about 'Los Caprichos', 6 Febr. 1799

Nature, Universe, Painting, Personality

“Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe. It's a very archaic form. Same things can be said with words, writing poetry, making sounds, music. It is a unique thing.... I think that the original revolutionary impulse behind the New York School, as I felt it anyway, and as I think my colleagues felt and the way we talked all the time, was a kind of a.... you felt as if you were driven into a corner against the wall, with no place to stand, just the place you occupied as if the act of painting was not making a picture.... it was as if you had to prove to yourself that truly the act of creation was still possible.... I felt as if I was talking to myself, having a dialectical monologue with myself to see if I could create.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, p. 66

School, Music, Way, Imagination

“Before Khamenei, many failed poets who achieved political power tried to dictate to poets, among them the Qajar Nassereddin Shah and the Chinese despot Mao Zedong. They failed because poetry has a magic genius that defies attempts at definition let alone dictation. Poetry is like love, Rilke wrote to his imaginary young poet, everyone knows what it is but no one can agree on a definition. Khamenei, aged 77, no longer fits the image of Rilke’s young poet. Nevertheless, maybe for his next birthday someone could give him a copy of Rilke’s magical essay.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Two excellent Persian translations are available. <br class="br"> When the Ayatollah Dictates Poetry http://www.aawsat.net/2015/07/article55344336/when-the-ayatollah-dictates-poetry, Ashraq Al-Awsat (Jul 11, 2015).

Love, Age, Birthday

“Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act…The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach. Houseman's test for great poetry.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

The Name and Nature of Poetry

Memory

“I’ve spent a lot of time in London over the last few years and I liked the idea of the Mughal emperor Babur meeting with modern-day disaffected youth and talking to them about their actions. He was a sharp literary critic who could be very sweeping and cruel about poetry if he thought it was bad poetry, and he said some fantastic things that I quoted word for word in the opera. I read the Baburnama – the memoirs of Babur – and quoted lines from it. “Writing badly will make you ill.” What a beautiful thing to say. I read that book and I thought, how dramatic! If he had been a figure in western history it would have been an opera. War, murder, love, tragedy, poetry. It always jumped out at me as something worth doing.”

Jeet Thayil (1959) Indian writer

Jeet Thayil: Confessions of an Indian Opium-Eater

Love, War, Books, Youth

“As Scots our Celtic heritage ties us closely together. It binds us with our cousins in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic and Wales. And with other Europeans lucky to blessed with good weather. We have Celtic cousins in Brittany, Galicia and Cornwall. Our is a heritage shared in a love of music and song, of poetry - and a special affinity with the sea and with nature.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Vision for Scotland in the European Union (December 12, 2007)

Love, Music, Nature, Weather

“If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, then science is tranquility recollected in emotion: a struggle to think carefully in the swirl of passionate curiosity.”

George Musser

Spooky Action at a Distance (2015), Ch. 4 : The Great Debate

Thinking, Passion, Science

“Our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIV

Truth, Faith, Imagination, Nature

“The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian. It would have been worse if I'd been a boy, though. Never mind the fact that all the really stirring poems I'd read at that time had been about slaughter, mayhem, sex and death — poetry was thought of as existing in the pastel female realm, along with embroidery and flower arranging. If I'd been male I would probably have had to roll around in the mud, in some boring skirmish over whether or not I was a sissy.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

On Writing Poetry (1995)

Death, Sex, Girl, Boy

“I was very sickly and weak during the first years of my infancy, and was, as much as I can remember of myself, a very whimsical boy. Sometimes I learned with enthusiasm, and often found myself in such a kind of ecstasy, that I neither could see nor hear what passed around me. In these fits of thought I forgot playthings and playfellows; I was happy only in my own musings. I always preferred the company of little girls to boys. I was not ten years old when I presented them with some poetry and little verses, the effusions of my heated imagination; some of them fell into my hands in riper years, and after reading them over, I left off poetry altogether. I loved my first private teacher very much; I even can remember him now. My second teacher was a simpleton; he could never understand me, nor enter into my feelings. My antipathy to this man grew daily greater; I could not learn of him, nor could he teach me anything. At last, when in my thirteenth year, I got rid of him, and he being encumbered with debts, I gave him my saving-box when he left. Whether I did this for pity's sake, or joy to get rid of him, I did not know.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Love, Happiness, Feeling, Imagination

“Poetry’s a mere drug, Sir.”

George Farquhar (1677–1707) Irish dramatist

Love and a Bottle (1698), Act iii, Sc. 2.

“Art for art's sake has never flourished in England. We are often called inartistic because our art is unconscious. Our drama and poetry, like our laws and our constitution, have evolved by accident while we thought we were doing something else, and so it will be with music. The composer must not shut himself up and think about art, he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community – if we seek for art we shall not find it.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) English composer

"Who Wants the English Composer?" (1912); cited from Ursula Vaughan Williams RVW (1964) pp. 101-2.

Life, Law, Art, Music

“Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.”

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

“Poetry is not a metrical exercise.”

James Fenton (1949) poet

An Introduction to English Poetry, Viking Penguin, London 2002 ISBN 0141004398

Exercises

“The first principle in race fusion is the opportunity to establish a home base in a country and a genuine love for that home. The home sense in the many peoples that have come to America is inseparable from the sense of the soil itself. Many immigrants have lived close to it, dug their hands into it, planted in it, watched their crops grow, and had a home stake around which cluster a thousand associations. Whatever there is of poetry in their lives is associated with the soil, and their worship is inseparable from it. Whatever there is heroic in their memories comes to them through it. In America it is not so. The majority of immigrants, with this land allegiance strong within them, find their way into crowded cities and unsightly industrial towns. They have little chance to plant and to harvest and to acquire a home stake; and when they do acquire it they cling to America. What do these men know, until perhaps it is too late, of the beauty of the expanse of America, and of the citizenship which gives them a partnership in national parks? What do they know of the traditions and achievements of Americans, inseparably linked with American soil? That allegiance of America which is part of real Americanization must somehow find a way of establishing affection for the soil.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Love, Men, People, Beauty

“A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a's for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I'd kept some.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

On Writing Poetry (1995)

Books

“… what I’ve tried to allow is for the essay to be a space in which the consciousness which reads poetry or remembers a line of poetry or listens to music or goes for a walk, is also the consciousness that is inflected and threatened and endangered by the political; is also the consciousness that registers and is permeated by the political. That somehow it is not a separate … consciousness that is hiding behind the facade of the man who remembers a line of poetry or forgets it, but that it is the same consciousness in which these various things are coming in and going out.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Small Orange Flags (2003)

Music, Reading, Forgetting

“Not to know the Bible is, in some ways, to be illiterate, to neglect the very roots of philosophy, art, architecture, literature, poetry and music.”

Chris Hedges book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

Source: American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Chapter One: Faith

Art, Music, Way, Literature

“He was a poet of great power, who described the loneliness of military life in the early Forties with unique eloquence and accuracy; he wrote, too, exciting and original love poetry.”

Alun Lewis (1915–1944) Welsh poet

Martin Seymour-Smith, Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) vol. 1, p. 353.
Criticism

Love, Life, Loneliness

“I alternate my aims; at one time, I concentrate on poetry, on a more expressionist kind of sculpture; at other times on form – I mean on a kind of sculpture that concerns itself with formal relations rather than emotions or ideas. I suppose that this principle of alternating my aims leads to a kind of oscillation in the evolution of my own particular style as a sculptor, but I feel that it prevents me from repeating myself.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

c. 1960
Source: 1960 - 1968, Dialogues – conversations with.., quotes, c. 1960, p. 154

Feeling, Idea, Time

“Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?”

Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) austrian dramatic and writer

Notebooks and Diaries (1820).

Music

“Perhaps you don’t desire poetry as much as you would like to have my torchy knowledge of your possible futures, but I dare say poetry will do you far more good. For knowing the future only makes you timid and complacent by turns, while poetry can shape you into the kind of souls who can face any future with boldness and wisdom and nobility, so that you need not know the future at all, so that any future will be an opportunity for greatness, if you have greatness in you.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Prentice Alvin (1989), Chapter 15.

Wisdom, Soul, Knowledge, Future

“Poetry is no more, no less than a mosaic of words, so great exactness is required for each one.”

T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) English Imagist poet and critic

Notes on Language and Style (1929)

“The one version of the bourgeois comprises the artisan, the trader, the official, the financier, and the entrepreneur, all of whom, in their own way, can claim to know what labor is. Juxtaposed to them from the beginning, stands a type of bourgeois who does research, writes poetry, composes and makes music, and philosophizes and who believes that these activities develop a world that is self-sufficient. It is obvious that these two fractions of the bourgeois ego get on only superficially and come together only in the hollow connection of property and cultivation. They create the century-long tension between the good and the evil bourgeois, the idealist and the exploiter, the visionary and the pragmatist, the ideally liberated bourgeois and the laboring bourgeois. This tension remains as inexhaustible as that between the world of work and “freedom” in general.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), pp. 63-64

World, Music, Way, Freedom

“Like Rimbaud before them, the surrealists abandoned the aesthetic altogether; it takes a certain courage to leave poetry for Africa [as Rimbaud himself did]. They revealed their insight as essentially moral in never forgetting for a moment that most living is a process of conforming to an established order which is inhuman in its drives and consequences. Their hatred sustained them through all the humiliating situations in which the modern artist find himself, and led them to conceptions beyond the reach of more passive souls. For them true 'poetry' was freedom from mechanical social responses. No wonder they loved the work of children and the insane – if not the creatures themselves.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 39-40

Love, Children, Soul, Courage

“By definition, if prose is a river, poetry is a fountain.”

Michael Longley (1939) poet

'Poetry Ireland Review' Summer 1999

“[Most people] are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. … Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.”

George Eliot book Scenes of Clerical Life

"The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton" Ch. 5
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

People, Soul, Lying, Fashion

“The soul cries out
Hear a woman singing
Don't want your bullshit, yeah
Just want your sexuality.
Don't want excuses, yeah
Write me your poetry in motion
Write it just for me, yeah
And sign it with a kiss.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Red Shoes (1993)

Soul, Kiss, Singing

“The blueprints of verse can be used to build things made of literal, or nonpoetic material, which is why most verse is not poetry.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

“And as for the close connection between philosophy and poetry, we can refer to a little-known statement by Thomas Aquinas in his Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics [I, 3]: the Philosopher is akin to the Poet in this, that both are concerned with the mirandum, the "wondrous," the astonishing, or whatever calls for astonishment or wonder. This statement is not that easy to fathom, since Thomas, like Aristotle, was a very sober thinker, completely opposed to any Romantic confusion of properly distinct realms. But on the basis of their common orientation towards the "wonderful" (the mirandum — something not to be found in the world of work!) — on this basis, then, of this common transcending-power, the philosophical act is related to the "wonderful," is in fact more closely related to it than to the exact, special sciences; to this point we shall return.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 68–69
The Aquinas quote cited — "The reason why the philosopher can be compared to the poet is that both are concerned with wonder" — is the epigraph of "The Philosophical Act".

World, Science

“I wanted the kind of power of insight and self-command that I experienced in the works of a Jean Paul Sartre, James Baldwin, or Margaret Walker. I wanted to make that kind of music that I heard in the poetry of a Langston Hughes or the stories of James Joyce. That combination of power and beauty more than anything else is probably what made me most want to become a writer. It wasn't until I became a journalist with the U. S. Air Force that I became more objective in my literary outlook and accepted that writing professionally included responsibilities to something other than my personal desires or needs.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(GCA Interview with Aberjhani). <br class="br">From Articles, Essays, and Poems, Gale Contemporary Authors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Authors

Beauty, Music, Personality

“Muhammadan law in its relation to women, is a pattern to European law. Look back to the history of Islam, and you will find that women have often taken leading places - on the throne, in the battle-field, in politics, in literature, poetry, etc.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Annie Besant Facts http://www.varanasi.org.in/annie-besant

Women, Law, History, Literature

“Music…is the vapour of art. It is to poetry what revery is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.”

Victor Hugo book William Shakespeare

La musique...est la vapeur de l’art. Elle est à la poésie ce que la rêverie est à la pensée, ce que le fluide est au liquide, ce que l’océan des nuées est à l’océan des ondes.
Part I, Book II, Chapter IV
William Shakespeare (1864)

Art, Music

“Both the uncertainty principle and the negentropy principle of information make Laplace's scheme [of exact determinism] completely unrealistic. The problem is an artificial one; it belongs to imaginative poetry, not to experimental science.”

Léon Brillouin (1889–1969) French physicist

[Léon Brillouin, Science and Information Theory, second edition, Academic Press, New York, 1962, 0-48643-918-6, 308]

Imagination, Problem, Science

“It seems as though he…has more of an interest, and more of a cultural capacity to reach out across the aisle in America, and to the world as a whole. As a wise man said once, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose…let's now see if he can deliver. Though I think he will soon find out that the vested interests of Washington are too stubborn for a relatively inexperienced politician such as himself to navigate.”

Munir Butt (1940–2015) British diplomat

Speaking about new U.S. President Barack Obama
Source: Diplomat Magazine profile, 2009.

World, Thinking

“For thousands of years, poetry was taught badly, and consequently it was immensely popular”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

24
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

“You are sitting under the trees, feeling all the ease, all the tranquility that can possibly be enjoyed; you see some poor figure laden with a faggot come turning out of some little path. The unexpected and always striking way in which this figure appears to you carries your mind instantly to the sadness of human life... In tilled lands you see these figures digging and delving. From time to time you see one straighten his loins and wipe his forehead with the back of his hand. Is this the gay frolicsome work in which some people would have us believe? Yet here for me is the real humanity, the great poetry.”

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) French painter

Quote from his letter, 1851; as quoted in Millet, by Romain Rolland, - translated from the French text of M. Romain Rolland by Miss Clementina Black; published: London, Duchworth & Co / New York, E. P. Dutton & Co, p. 11+12
1851 - 1870

Life, People, Sadness, Way

“I was born in the East Indies, once the cradle of poetry, philosophy and history and now their tomb. I belong to that race which composed the Mahabharata and invented chess. But this nation which made codes of it's poems and formulated politics in a game is no longer alive! It survives imprisoned in it's own country. I asked for India liberty and light; as for myself, more happy than my countrymen, i am free - civis sum.”

Francisco Luís Gomes (1829–1869) Indo-Portuguese physician, writer, historian, economist, political scientist and MP in the Portuguese parli…

Quoted by Nishitha Desai in Lusotopie 2000, p. 474

Happiness, History, Game, Light

“I was the living proof of T. S Eliot's assertion that poetry can communicate before it is understood. the conscious, analytical part of my response was lulled into a kind of stupor by the rhythms and richness of the imagery of the poetry I was reading.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

Drums of Morning, 1992

Communication, Reading, Parting

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

World, Beauty

“I loved to talk about music to Nicky … His influence came from people like The Beatles and The Beach Boys, and he had these ideas about layering vocals, painting landscapes with music. Roma knew about Irish mythology, told stories, wrote poetry and had this special feeling for lyrics. My grounding came from the classics.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Women's Weekly interview (2006)

Love, People, Music, Feeling

“When the full magnetic rapport of Karezza has been realized, in which the two souls and bodies seem as one, supported and floating on some divine stream in Paradise, all sense of restraint and difficulty gone, and succeeded by a heavenly ease, power, exaltation, pure and perfect bliss, diffused throughout the entire being, it is then that the eyes and faces shine as though transfigured, every tone becomes music, every emotion poetry.”

John William Lloyd (1857–1940) American anarchist, sexologist, utopian theorist and author (1857-1940)

The Karezza Method : Or Magnetation, the Art of Connubial Love (1931) Ch. 17 : Karezza the Beautifier http://www.reuniting.info/karezza_method_lloyd/karezza_the_beautiful

Music, Soul, Support, Sense

“I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do. It appeals to the imagination from the start: those colours, green and yellow, create an atmosphere.”

J. Milton Hayes (1884–1940) British actor and writer

Quoted in Waugh, Alex (1967) My Brother and Other Profiles

God, Imagination

“There Poetry shall tune her sacred voice,
And wake from ignorance the Western World.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

The Tragedy of Irene (1749), Act IV, Sc. 1

World

“Khamenei is not the first ruler of Iran with whom poets have run into trouble. For some 12 centuries poetry has been the Iranian people’s principal medium of expression. Iran may be the only country where not a single home is found without at least one book of poems. Initially, Persian poets had a hard time to define their place in society. The newly converted Islamic rulers suspected the poets of trying to revive the Zoroastrian faith to undermine the new religion. Clerics saw poets as people who wished to keep the Persian language alive and thus sabotage the ascent of Arabic as the new lingua franca. Without the early Persian poets, Iranians might have ended up like so many other nations in the Middle East who lost their native languages and became Arabic speakers. Early on, Persian poets developed a strategy to check the ardor of the rulers and the mullahs. They started every qasida with praise to God and Prophet followed by panegyric for the ruler of the day. Once those “obligations” were out of the way they would move on to the real themes of the poems they wished to compose. Everyone knew that there was some trick involved but everyone accepted the result because it was good. Despite that modus vivendi some poets did end up in prison or in exile while many others spent their lives in hardship if not poverty. However, poets were never put to the sword. The Khomeinist regime is the first in Iran’s history to have executed so many poets. Implicitly or explicitly, some rulers made it clear what the poet couldn’t write. But none ever dreamt of telling the poet what he should write. Khamenei is the first to try to dictate to poets, accusing them of “crime” and” betrayal” if they ignored his injunctions.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

When the Ayatollah Dictates Poetry http://www.aawsat.net/2015/07/article55344336/when-the-ayatollah-dictates-poetry, Ashraq Al-Awsat (Jul 11, 2015).

God, People, Books, Faith

“In the midst of the activities that distract me [shooting partridges in the woods], when I remember a few lines of poetry, when I recall some sublime painting, my spirit is roused to indignation and spurns the vain sustenance of the common herd. And in the same way, when I think of those I love, my soul clings eagerly to the elusive trace of these cherished ideas. Yes, I am sure of it, great friendship is like great genius, and the remembrance of a great and enduring friendship is like that of great works of genius… What a life would be that of two great poets who loved each other as we do! That would be too great for human kind.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in a letter to his friend J. B. Pierret, 18 September 1818, from the Forest of Boixe; as quoted in Eugene Delacroix – selected letters 1813 – 1863”, ed. and translation Jean Stewart, art Works MFA publications, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 2001, p. 41
1815 - 1830

Love, Life, Friendship, Way

“The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today…The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.”

George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962) Historian

"Autobiography of an Historian", An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949).

Women, Men, History, Thinking

“You can teach the writing of verse.. like prose.. an instrument.. and the recognition of true poetry. The rest, writers must teach them selves.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

Interview with J D McCarthy 'The Art of Poetry' no 35 Fall 1985

“Prose and poetry are different in construction. You can lie back and read prose, and you can read it fast. Poetry on the other hand, requires a different kind of attention and concentration … the effect it has on the ear and the imagination.”

Michael Schmidt (poet) (1947) American poet

The Great Modern Poets, London, 2006

Lie, Imagination, Reading

“When the poet said that for him poetry was not a purpose, but a passion, he was also expressing the feelings of the true scientist to his own field.”

Varadaraja V. Raman (1932) American physicist

THOUGHTS ON SCIENCE AND LITERATURE’’
Truth and Tension in Science and Religion

Feeling, Passion

“Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Marble Faun

Source: The Marble Faun (1860), Chapter XLI: Snowdrops and Maidenly Delights

Thinking, Reading

“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time—’

That’s the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down.”

Frederik Pohl book The Space Merchants

Source: The Space Merchants (1953), Chapter 4 (p. 48)

Silence, Time

“Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Life, Confidence, Support

“Poetry is everlasting. It is not going away. But it has never occupied a sizeable part of the world's business, and it never will.”

A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) American poet

Paris Review interview (1996)

World, Business, Parting

“Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"The Anonymity of the Regional Poet: Ted Kooser," from Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992)
Essays

Intelligence, Literature, Training

“Maslow's psychology, firmly based upon Freud and Watson, simply points out that the optimistic side of the picture has been overlooked; the deterministic laws of our 'lower nature' hold sway in their won field; but there are other laws. Man's freedom is a reality -- a reality that makes a difference to his physical, as well as his mental health. When Frankl's prisoners ceased to believe in the possibility of freedom, they grew sick and died. On the other hand, when they saw that Dachau had no chimney, standing out all night in the rain seemed no great hardship; they laughed and joked. The conclusion needs to be stated in letters ten feet high. In order to realise his possibilities, man must believe in an open future; he must have a vision of something worth doing. And this will not be possible until all the determinism and pessimism that we have inherited from the 19th century -- and which has infected every department of our culture, from poetry to atomic physics -- has been dismissed as fallacious and illogical. Twentieth century science, philosophy, politics, literature -- even music -- has been constructed upon a weltanschauung that leaves half of human nature out of account.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

p 219-220
New Pathways In Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972)

Health, Law, Music, Literature

“For Poetry is the wisdom of the blood,
That scarlet tree within, which has the power
To make dull words bud forth and burst in flower.”

Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969) British baronet

"When First the Poets Sung", line 47.
These lines were repeatedly drawn on by Sitwell in his later works.

Wisdom, Flowers, Tree

“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

Art