“That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.”
Topic
poetry
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“Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.”
“Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.”
“I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.”
“As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.”
“I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.”
“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.”
“Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.”
“What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.”
“For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.”
“Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.”
“Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.”
“A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.”
“I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.”
“Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.”
“Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.”
“Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.”
“In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.”
“Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.”
“I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.”
“I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.”
“A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.”
“Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.”
“On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.”