Poetic Quotes - Page 24

• For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - "le suggérer, voilà le rêve!").

  Umberto Eco

  Poetry, Joy, Three

  Umberto Eco (2012). “On Literature”, p.41, Random House

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• In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Poetry, Roles, Literature

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• The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.

  Tony Hoagland

  Poetry, Literature, Mimesis

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• Don't feel guilty if you don't immediately love your stepchildren as you do your own, or as much as you think you should. Everyoneneeds time to adjust to the new family, adults included. There is no such thing as an "instant parent."
  Actually, no concrete object lies outside of the poetic sphere as long as the poet knows how to use the object properly.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Lying, Love You, Thinking

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• Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience--the recognitions or revelations--out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions.

  Denise Levertov

  Attitude, Moving, Poetry

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• To anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson's Victory, seems to float there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but also as a poetic approach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads.

  Herman Melville

  Past, Victory, Hull

  Herman Melville (2016). “Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories”, p.166, Penguin

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• Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.

  Walter Pater

  Eye, Creativity, Exercise

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• Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

  Robert Graves

  Hands, Poetry, Trying

  "Ten key things about... poetry" by Dorota Nosowicz, www.theguardian.com. October 1, 2000.

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• The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Art, Sacrifice, Order

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• I invented the colors of the vowels!--A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green--I made rules for the form and movement of each consonant, and, and with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses.

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Blue, Color, White

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• My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself.

  David Starkey

  Thinking, Forgiving, Listening

  Source: andreaauten.wordpress.com

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• The ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted.

  Hans-Georg Gadamer

  Lying, Unique, Answers

  Hans-Georg Gadamer, Robert Bernasconi (1986). “The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays”, p.71, Cambridge University Press

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• Life ain't a concept. Music is not a concept. My titles are poetic abstractions of something that is with me all the time, not necessarily in music, but in life. Everybody's life.

  Merzbow

  Titles, Music Is, Abstraction

  Source: thequietus.com

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• Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Dream, Memories, Past

  Leo Tolstoy (2011). “War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky”, p.520, Vintage

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• Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Inspirational, Motivational, History

  Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, James A. Grimshaw (1998). “Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence”, p.15, University of Missouri Press

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• Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, desiccates but is wrested from the water. It has fascinated man for thousands of years not only as a substance he prized and was willing to labour to obtain, but also as a generator of poetic and of mythic meaning. The contradictions it embodies only intensify its power and its links with experience of the sacred.

  Margaret Visser

  Men, Rocks, Years

  Margaret Visser (2010). “Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea”, p.75, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• I think the great thing about theatre, and if you start in theatre, is that it does build a confidence in poetic themes and ideas.

  Abi Morgan

  Thinking, Ideas, Theatre

  Source: collider.com

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• What we cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts.

  Naum Gabo

  Art, Philosophy, Thinking

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• A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle: and patriotism is loyalty to that principle. In poetic minds and in popular enthusiasm this feeling becomes closely associated with the soil and the symbols of the country. But the secret sanctification of the soil and the symbol is the idea which they represent, and this idea the patriot worships through the name and the symbol, as a lover kisses with rapture the glove of his mistress and wears a lock of her hair upon his heart.

  George William Curtis

  Loyalty, Country, Heart

  George William Curtis (1894). “On the principles and character of American institutions, and the duties of American citizens, 1856-1891”

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• The Victorians have been immoderately praised, and immoderately blamed, and surely it is time we formed some reasonable picture of them? There was their courageous, intellectually adventurous side, their greedy and inhuman side, their superbly poetic side, their morally pretentious side, their tea and buttered toast side, and their champagne and Skittles side. Much like ourselves, in fact, though rather dirtier.

  Robertson Davies

  Tea, Facts, Sides

  "The Girl with the Swansdown Seat/Abode of Love/1848". 1956.

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• Poetic and speculative photographs can result if one works carefully and accurately, yet letting chance relationships have full play.

  Frederick Sommer

  Photography, Play, Chance

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• I think I'm a whole lot to handle. I definitely am, on every aspect. I'm the video director. I'm the graphics designer. I'm the rapper. I'm the visionary. I'm the music producer. I'm the executive producer. I'm just going to end it off to be poetic: I'm the future of music.

  Kanye West

  Thinking, Rapper, Visionaries

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• The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Ideas, People, Feelings

  Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose "The Nature and Aims of Fiction" (1969)

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• I know that we live after death and again and again, not in the memory of our children, or as a mulch for trees and flowers, however poetic that may be, but looking passionately and egocentrically out of our eyes.

  Brenda Ueland

  Children, Memories, Flower

  Brenda Ueland (1939). “Me”

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• A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.

  Sherman Alexie

  Use, Comedy, Language

  Interview with Joelle Fraser, www.english.illinois.edu. 2000.

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