Poetic Quotes - Page 16

• There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Ideas, Utterance

  Evelyn Waugh (2012). “A Little Order: Selected Journalism”, p.199, Penguin UK

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• Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

  Marguerite Young

  Philosophy, Realism, Passages

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• English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.

  Lytton Strachey

  Drama, Mind, Literature

  Lytton Strachey (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Lytton Strachey (Illustrated)”, p.58, Delphi Classics

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• The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

  Harold Bloom

  Teacher, Thinking, Trying

  Harold Bloom, Robert Moynihan (1986). “A Recent imagining: interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man”

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• An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.

  Salvatore Quasimodo

  Mean, Men, Mind

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• The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

  Salvatore Quasimodo

  Order, Creative, Use

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• Except here it's more power, more energy, younger and also in Europe it's still not only entertainment. Theater or films are looked at as a moral institution. That's why maybe they're so poetic. Here it's clear entertainment.

  Maximilian Schell

  Europe, Energy, Entertainment

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• 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.

  John Drinkwater

  Drama, Epic, Long

  John Drinkwater (1922). “The Lyric: An Essay”, p.25, Library of Alexandria

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• I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.

  Marguerite Young

  Real, Book, Writing

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• The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.

  Salvatore Quasimodo

  Distance, Looks, Pages

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• Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

  Howard Nemerov

  Literature, Verses

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• The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.

  Salvatore Quasimodo

  Spiritual, Earth, Discourse

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• Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.

  James Broughton

  India, France, Denmark

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• I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

  Kenneth Koch

  New York, Poet

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• If modern design moved the stage picture away from the specific, tangible, illusionistic world of Romanticism and Realism into a generalized, theatrical, and poetic realm in which the pictorial image functioned as an extension of the playwright's themes and structures (a metanarrative), then postmodern design is a dissonant reminder that no single point of view can predominate, even within a single image.

  Arnold Aronson

  Views, Design, World

  Arnold Aronson (2005). “Looking Into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography”, p.14, University of Michigan Press

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• The freedom of poetic license.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Freedom, Poetic License, Poetry

  "Pro Publio Sestio". Oration by Marcus Tullius Cicero (Section 6), 56 BC.

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• The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.

  Robert Graves

  Simple, Emotional, Differences

  Robert Graves, Patrick J. Quinn (2000). “Some speculations on literature, history, and religion”, Carcanet Press Ltd.

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• Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call "history" by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds.... World historyonly comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions.

  Stefan Zweig

  Mean, History, Done

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• There are in this world two kinds of natures, - those that have wings, and those that have feet, - the winged and the walking spirits. The walking are the logicians; the winged are the instinctive and poetic.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Wings, Two, Feet

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1982). “Uncle Tom's Cabin, Or, Life Among the Lowly ; The Minister's Wooing ; Oldtown Folks”, p.704, Library of America

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• Indeed, so far from being humorous, the male American is the most abnormally serious creature who ever existed.. It is only fair to admit that he can exaggerate, but even his exaggeration has a rational basis. It is not founded on wit or fancy; it does not spring from any poetic imagination.

  Oscar Wilde

  Spring, Humorous, Imagination

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• They best can judge a poet's worth, Who oft themselves have known The pangs of a poetic birth By labours of their own.

  William Cowper

  Judging, Birth, Known

  William Cowper, James Thomson (1832). “The Works of Cowper and Thompson: Including Many Letters and Poems Never Before Published in this Country. With a New and Interesting Memoir of the Life of Thomson”, p.113

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• Spatial art does not begin with a poetic mood or idea, but with construction of one or more figures, with the harmonizing of several colors and tones, or with the devaluation of spatial relationships and so on.

  Paul Klee

  Art, Space, Color

  Paul Klee (1967). “Paul Klee, 1879-1940: A Retrospective Exhibition”

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• If one hour's work is enough to govern France, four minutes is all that is needed for Italy. There is no nation more easily frightened; even its poetic imagination predisposes it to fear, and they look upon power as on an image that fills them with terror.

  Madame de Stael

  Imagination, Looks, Four

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• Poetic language is singularly appropriate for recounting the life of the king who is traditionally accepted as the author of the poetic psalms, some of which are included in the narrative.

  Robert Pinsky

  Kings, Narrative, Language

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• As painters...we must always remember that our precious poetic visions and spiritual insights will remain forever locked within us until we can boil them down to a complex arrangement of a few hundred or possibly even thousands of brushstrokes.

  Richard Schmid

  Spiritual, Forever, Vision

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