Poetic Quotes - Page 18

• There is so much poetry, and yet nothing is more rare than a poetic work. This is what the masses make out of poetical sketches, studies, aphorisms, trends, ruins, and raw material.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Poetry, Raw Materials, Trends

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• We may have an excellent ear for music, without being able to perform in any kind; we may judge well of poetry, without being poets, or possessing the least of a poetic vein; but we can have no tolerable notion of goodness without being tolerably good.

  Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

  Judging, Veins, Ears

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• It is unwise to equate scientific activity with what we call reason, poetic activity with what we call imagination. Without the imaginative leap from facts to generalisation, no theoretic discovery in science is made. The poet, on the other hand, must not imagine but reason--that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is a technical logic, a poetic reasoning in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem's coherence is achieved.

  Cecil Day-Lewis

  Exercise, Science, Discovery

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• We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Poetry, Littles, Mathematics

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.270, Delphi Classics

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• Before seeing Truffaut 's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid I'm just not good enough to go to them. But this series of sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children turns out to be that rarity a poetic comedy that's really funny.

  Pauline Kael

  Children, Simple, Small Changes

  Pauline Kael (1980). “When the lights go down”, Henry Holt & Co

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• Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  "Culture and Value" by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Peter Winch, (p. 75e), 1980.

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• Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.

  Camille Paglia

  Genius, Emily

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Arion, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.

  Octavio Paz

  Two, Sometimes, Break

  "Signs in Rotation" (1967) in "The Bow and the Lyre : The Poem, The Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History" by Octavio Paz, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms, (p. 249), 1973.

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• We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility; but there is one high poetic fancy in the New Atlantis that stays in the mind after all its fancies and inventions have been forgotten. In the New Atlantis, an island kingdom lying in very distant seas, the only commodity of external trade is light: Bacon's own special light, the light of understanding.

  Peter Medawar

  Lying, Sea, Islands

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• Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

  Antonin Artaud

  War, Poetry, Drug

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.122, Grove Press

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• I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting. I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that it is scientific as well as poetic; that imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities.

  John Constable

  Reality, Imagination, Looks

  John Constable (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of John Constable (Illustrated)”, p.584, Delphi Classics

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• The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.

  Northrop Frye

  Primaries, Literal

  Northrop Frye, Alvin A. Lee (2006). “The Great Code: The Bible and Literature”, p.79, University of Toronto Press

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• One man's piss-soaked sadomasochistic orgy is another man's poetic ecstasy.

  Dan Savage

  Men, Ecstasy, Another Man

  "Come to the Bash". Savage Love Column, www.thestranger.com. February 09, 2006.

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• In the early days the Cubism' method of grasping an object was to go round and round it. The Futurists declared that one had to get inside it. In my opinion the two views can be reconciled in a poetic cognition of the world. But to the very fact that they appealed to the creative depths in the painter by awakening in him hidden forces which were intuitive and vitalizing, the Futurist theories did more than the Cubist principles to open up unexplored and boundless horizons.

  Gino Severini

  Views, Two, Creative

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

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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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• Adoration is not some fervent spiritual or poetic exercise reserved for a chosen few. I believe the human race will die out and destroy nature if it does not learn again how to adore God, the God in all of us, God shining and living in nature, and learn again how to act from and in that spirit of adoration.

  Andrew Harvey

  Spiritual, Believe, Exercise

  Andrew Harvey (1994). “Dialogues with a Modern Mystic”, Quest Books

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• It is impossible not to react to the current state of affairs through personal action and artistic production. We have been at war for three years. One desperately feels the need for someone to speak some sort of truth, either poetic or factual.

  Casey Spooner

  War, Years, Three

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• Remember picture books are the closest form of writing to a poem. Even though they don't have to rhyme, they must be poetic. They must be written so the worst actress can read with comfort and expression.

  Kirby Larson

  Book, Writing, Expression

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• Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Creation, Something New, Ifs

  Paolo Bacigalupi (2010). “The Windup Girl”, p.214, Hachette UK

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• When it's done with being graceful and poetic, language is meant to communicate, after all.

  Max Barry

  Done, Language, Communicate

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• For me a work of art must be an elevated interpretation of nature. The search for the ideal has been the purpose of my life. In landscape or seascape, I love above all the poetic motif.

  William-Adolphe Bouguereau

  Art, Purpose, Landscape

  "19th Century European Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture", Sotheby's (Firm), p. 123, 1994.

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• One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Flower, Ignorance, Knowledge

  "Robert Browning". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1903.

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• Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.

  Tracy K. Smith

  Eye, Writing, Space

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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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• What we know for sure is that metaphor is the raw uranium of poetry, and that an urge to say that one thing is like something else is one of the earliest markers of the poetic spirit, the nascent poet.

  Tony Hoagland

  Spirit, Metaphor, Like Something

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