“Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.”
Topic
poetry
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“The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.”
“An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.”
“The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.”
“If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.”
“A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.”
“You watch an old 'Jeopardy!' and the categories alone are very plain. 'Poetry,' or 'Movies,' or 'Physics.' If you watch it now, though, there'll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.”
“It's necessary to start most work alone. But I'm tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it's borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate.”
“Poetry is not only dream and vision it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”
“Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.”
“I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.”
“Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.”
“A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
“Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.”
“Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.”
“Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.”
“The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.”
“Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.”
“The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn't mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.”
“We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.”
“Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.”
“But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.”
“There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.”
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”