Posts Tagged ‘poetry’
Quote of the Day
Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.
Quote of the Day
As for “free verse,” I expressed my view twenty-five years ago by saying that no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.
Quote of the Day
There are two versions to every poem—the crying version and the straight version.
Quote of the Day
A man is a poet if the difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.
“A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence…”
As to the poetical character itself…it is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing. It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence because he has no identity—he is continually infor[ming] and filling some other body. The sun, the moon, the sea and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none, no identity. He is certainly the most unpoetical of all god’s creatures.
—John Keats, in a letter to Richard Woodhouse
“A desolate-minded man, ye kna…”
But he was a lonely man, fond o’ goin’ out wi’ his family, and saying nowt to noan of ’em. When a man goes in a family way he keeps togither wi’ ’em and chats a bit wi’ ’em, but many’s a time I’ve seed him a takin’ his family out in a string, and niver geein’ the deariest bit of notice to ’em; standin’ by hissel’ and stoppin’ behind agapin’, wi’ his jaws workin’ the whoal time; but niver no cracking wi’ ’em, nor no pleasure in ’em—a desolate-minded man, ye kna. Queer thing that, mun, but it was his hobby, ye kna. It was potry as did it. We all have our hobbies—some for huntin’, some cardin’, some fishin’, some wrestlin’…But his hobby, ye mun kna, was potry. It was a queer thing, but it would like enough cause him to be desolate; and I’se often thowt that his brain was that fu’ of sic stuff, that he was forced to be always at it whether or no, wet or fair, mumbling to hissel’ along the roads.
—An unknown innkeeper, on William Wordsworth
Quote of the Day
What are the eternal subjects of poetry, among all nations and at all times? They are actions; human actions.
Quote of the Day
I confess my chief endeavors are to delight the age in which I live. If the humor of this be for low comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force my genius to obey it, though with more reputation I could write in verse.
Quote of the Day
[Poetic meter’s] effect is not due to our perceiving a pattern in something outside us, but to our becoming patterned ourselves.
Quote of the Day
Poetry distinguishes itself from prose on the technical side by the devices which are, precisely, its means of escaping from prose. Something is continually being killed by prose which the poet wants to preserve.
Quote of the Day
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact.
Quote of the Day
The poet chooses and selects and has [a] sense of arrival as the poem ends; he is expressing what it feels like to arrive at his meanings.
What is poetry like?
Poetry is like mining for radium. The output an ounce, the labor a year.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.
Your teacher says that poetry is like an exquisite and towering pagoda that appears at the snap of the fingers or like the twelve towers of the five cities of the immortals that ephemerally exist at the edge of heaven. I do not agree. To use a metaphor, poetry is like building a house out of tiles, glazed bricks, wood, and stone—he must put them all together, one by one, on solid ground.
Poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in solitude and in the times of solitude, as, for example, in earliest morning.
Poetry is like a panther: it delights the eye; but against any attempt to enslave it, it may wreak revenge.
Many a fair precept in poetry is like a seeming demonstration in the mathematics, very specious in the diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation.
Poetry is like math or chess or music—it requires a slightly freaky misshapen brain, and those kinds of brains don’t last.
Writing a poem is like getting a short-term contract from God. You get this one done and if you do a good job, then maybe another contract will come along.
Writing poetry is like writing history—talent, learning, and understanding in suitable proportion.
Poetry is like religion: sometimes the vision is immediate and almost frightening in its intensity; sometimes it is reached with difficulty, giving intimations only, and those confused and partial.
Writing a poem is like solving for X in an equation.
—Attributed to W.H. Auden by Robert Earl Hayden
Poetry is like being alive twice.
Quote of the Day
My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. “Would you hit a woman with a child?—No, I’d hit her with a brick.” Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.
Quote of the Day
The poetic act consists in suddenly seeing that an idea splits into a number of motifs of equal value and in grouping them; they rhyme; and to place an external seal upon them we have their common metrics which the final beat binds together.
Quote of the Day
The poet, absorbed in the solving of formal problems, the struggle with slippery eels of language, has no time for dissimulation and he tells us more about himself than he knows.
Quote of the Day
The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.
“A succession of separate poetic experiences…”
Poetic tension can only be sustained for a short time. Poe’s saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just. What happens, I think, is this. The poetic mood, selecting a subject, records its perception of that subject, the result is a lyric, and the mood passes. On its recurrence another subject is selected and the process repeated. But if another energy than the purely poetic, the energy of coordination of which I have spoken, comes into operation, there will be a desire by the poet to link the records of his recurrent poetic perceptions together, and so to construct many poems into a connected whole. Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. The decision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood shall be related to the material used at the next is not in itself an operation of the purely poetic energy, but of another.
Quote of the Day
The rhythm of a poem ceases the moment the feeling loses its intensity…Beauty in a wild foray, the form we have created, now remote from the emotion we experienced.
Quote of the Day
Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.
Alec Nevala-Lee 