Poetry Is Quotes - Page 27

• 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

  Art, Sacrifice, Successful

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

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• Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Poetry, Language

  Stanley Kunitz, Kent P. Ljungquist (2013). “Conversations with Stanley Kunitz”, p.69, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Poetry is good for unleashing images.

  Paula Rego

  Poetry, Unleashing

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• Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare.

  Matthew Arnold

  Energy, Genius, May

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• Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.

  Dylan Thomas

  Vision, Naked, Movement

  Dylan Thomas (1968). “Quite Early One Morning”, p.119, New Directions Publishing

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• Poetry is a big space and I love it.

  Selima Hill

  Space, Bigs

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• IN PERSIA I SAW that poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung--for one reason alone--because it works.A right combination of image & tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotional/aesthetic mood & trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping, fits of dancing--measurable physical response to art. For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era--we read under the influence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas.

  Hakim

  Art, Emotional, Dancing

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• To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour

  Oscar Wilde

  Self, Ruined, Honour

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.47, GENERAL PRESS

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• The trouble with poetry is it's often written to the sound of a drum only the poet may hear; nonetheless, blessed are those poets who always manage to find unshakeable pleasure in their own works.

  Criss Jami

  Blessed, May, Sound

  Criss Jami (2015). “Killosophy”, p.66, Criss Jami

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• Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation."

  Paul Valery

  Idols, Essence, Principles

  "Littérature". Book by Paul Valery, 1930.

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• True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.

  William Faulkner

  Poetry, Heaven, Earth

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• My poetry is a game. My life is a game. But I am not a game.

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Games, Life Is, Life Is A Game

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• You've often heard me say - perhaps too often - that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.

  Robert Frost

  Mean, Littles, Lost

  "Robert Frost: A Backward Look". Book by Louis Untermeyer, January 1, 1964.

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• Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.

  George Orwell

  Community, Nonsense, Individual

  George Orwell (1986). “The complete works of George Orwell”

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• Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.

  Jean Cocteau

  Mean, Men, Discipline

  "Diary of an Unknown". Book by Jean Cocteau, 1988.

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• Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind ; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.

  Lionel Trilling

  Mind, Saws, Constitution

  Lionel Trilling (1955). “Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture. (2. Print.)”

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• The statement of ideas in a poem may have to do with logic. More profoundly, it may be identified with the emotional progression of the poem, in terms of the music and images, so that the poem is alive throughout. Another, more fundamental statement in poetry, is made through the images themselves those declarations, evocative, exact, and musical, which move through time and are the actions of a poem.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Moving, Emotional, Ideas

  "The Life of Poetry". Book by Muriel Rukeyser, p. 31, 1949.

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• Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.

  Basil Bunting

  Smart, Sound, Ears

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• For me, poetry is the colour of Elizabeth Taylor's eyes, or the pauses in Pinter's plays - only the pauses, not the words.

  Roger Lewis

  Eye, Play, Pinter

  Evening Standard, October 31, 2011.

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• Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.

  Herbert Read

  Real, Writing, Mean

  "English Prose Style". Book by Herbert Read, 1928.

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• The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech...For true poetry is never speech but always a song.

  Herbert Read

  Song, Use, Speech

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• Poetry, is the insulation that lies between the inner walls of the mind.

  Robert M. Hensel

  Wall, Lying, Mind

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• Futurism and Cubism are comparable in importance to the invention of perspective, for which they substituted a new concept of space. All subsequent movements were latent in them or brought about by them.. ..the two movements cannot be regarded as in opposition to each other, even though they started from opposite points; I maintain [an idea approved by Appolinaire and later by Matisse that they are two extremes of the same sign, tending to coincide at certain points which only the poetic instinct of the painter can discover: 'poetry' being the content and 'raison d'tre' of art.

  Gino Severini

  Art, Opposites, Ideas

  "Letters of the great artists" by Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, (pp. 248-249), 1963.

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• 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

  Literature, Proportion, Interpretation

  Dana Gioia (2002). “Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture”, Graywolf Pr

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• Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.

  Dana Gioia

  Listening, Special, Way

  "Paradigms Lost", interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum, Spring 1995.

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