Poetic Quotes - Page 8

• Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere.

  Andrea Barrett

  Dark, Evil, Gothic

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• Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.

  Etel Adnan

  Art, Expression, Color

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• With impeccable timing and a fine instinct for the telling detail, Francesca Abbate evokes the plenitudes and the deprivations of human habitation, the nurturing richness of landscape, and the soul-wound wrought by casual defacement. Abbate has a superb capacity for distillation and a mastery of poetic line, and her diction is remarkably flexible, accommodating both the demotic and the lyrical. Her poems are as consistent in quality as they are varied in pacing, surface, and tone. A fine first book.

  Linda Gregerson

  Book, Soul, Quality

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• It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.

  John Drinkwater

  Taken, Two, Achievement

  John Drinkwater (1922). “The Lyric: An Essay”, p.11, Library of Alexandria

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• The pilgrim is a poetic traveler, one who believes that there is poetry on the road, at the heart of everything.

  Phil Cousineau

  Believe, Heart, Traveler

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• I had toward the poetic art a peculiar relation which was only practical after I had cherished in my mind for a long time a subject which possessed me, a model which inspired me, a predecessor who attracted me, until at length, after I had molded it

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Art, Long, Mind

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• The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.

  Philip Larkin

  Ideas, Feelings, Desire

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• You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble

  Charles Olson

  People, Poetry, Trying

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• It reminded him of his Uncle Seamus, the notorious and poetic drunk, who would sit down at the breakfast table the morning after a bender, drain a bottle of stout and say 'Ah, the chill of consciousness returns

  Molly O'Neill

  Morning, Uncles, Drinking

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• When Reason Breaks is infused with a rare blend of suspense and sensitivity, despair and hope. The poetic spirit of Emily Dickinson shines through the gloom of daily struggles faced by modern teens, as they discover the possibilities where they dwell.

  Margarita Engle

  Struggle, Shining, Despair

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• The poetic sensibility was too good for this world, it was best to burn brightly and to die young like a shooting star.

  George Howe Colt

  Stars, Shooting, World

  George Howe Colt (2006). “November of the Soul: The Enigma of Suicide”, p.175, Simon and Schuster

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• Eccentric doesn't bother me. 'Eccentric' being a poetic interpretation of a mathematical term meaning something that doesn't follow the lines - that's okay.

  Crispin Glover

  Meaning Something, Lines, Eccentric

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• They use the simple back and forth, the same, old rhythm That a baby can pick up, and join, right with 'em. But their rhymes are pathetic, they think they copacetic Using nursery terms, at least not poetic.

  Kool Keith

  Baby, Rap, Simple

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• Yes, I heard my people singing!-in the glow of parlor coal-stove and on summer porches sweet with lilac air, from choir loft and Sunday morning pews-and my soul was filled with their harmonies. Then, too, I heard these songs in the very sermons of my father, for in the Negro's speech there is much of the phrasing and rhythms of folk-song. The great, soaring gospels we love are merely sermons that are sung; and as we thrill to such gifted gospel singers as Mahalia Jackson, we hear the rhythmic eloquence of our preachers, so many of whom, like my father, are masters of poetic speech.

  Paul Robeson

  Summer, Song, Sweet

  Paul Robeson (1998). “Here I Stand”, p.15, Beacon Press

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• God is a synergetic experience. Science can never reveal it, philosophy can never come to it - only a poetic approach, a very passive, very loving approach, can.

  Rajneesh

  Inspirational, Philosophy, Relaxation

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• More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.

  Walter Isaacson

  Romantic, Jobs, Book

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• I am a big fan of Dos Passos' stylistic ability, his poetic approach to prose, but the ideas presented in the songs are quite different from those which he exemplified.

  Neil Peart

  Song, Ideas, Fans

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• A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.

  Paul Verlaine

  Mean, Poetry, Machines

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• One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

  Paul Muldoon

  Poetry, Tree, Way

  Interview with John Redmond, www.poetrymagazines.org.uk. November 2, 1995.

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• I'm saying that the domain of poetry includes both oral & written forms, that poetry goes back to a pre-literate situation & would survive a post-literate situation, that human speech is a near-endless source of poetic forms, that there has always been more oral than written poetry, & that we can no longer pretend to a knowledge of poetry if we deny its oral dimension.

  Jerome Rothenberg

  Speech, Dimensions, Deny

  Jerome Rothenberg, Diane Rothenberg (2016). “Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics”, p.484, Univ of California Press

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• The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet

  June Jordan

  Writing, Important, Language

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• In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.

  Roman Jakobson

  Symbolism, Sound, Language

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• I love chaos.... It's the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.

  Ben Shahn

  Elements, World, Dull

  Ben Shahn (1972). “Ben Shahn”

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• So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that can be embedded in a particular human voice reporting from the field. One beautiful axis of voice is the one that runs between vulnerability and detachment, between 'It hurts to be alive' and 'I can see a million miles from here.' A good poetic voice can do both at once.

  Tony Hoagland

  Beautiful, Running, Hurt

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• All that's left now is purely poetic work, putting more life into individual places, as I've made so sure of the fundamental mood and dimension of expression that it won't leave me groping around in uncertainty any more.

  Oskar Kokoschka

  Expression, Fundamentals, Dimensions

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