- Mind
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- Nov 07, 2020
Poetry Quotes
On verse, beauty, and the search to define art.
This set opens with the case for teaching children poetry early, since it broadens young minds and passes on virtue almost by inheritance, then weighs how differently prose and poetry can each carry weight. See Art quotes for related themes.
- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Always
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- Nov 07, 2020
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
- Music
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- Nov 07, 2020
The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.
- Language
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- Nov 07, 2020
English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.
- May
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- Nov 07, 2020
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back.
- Music
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- Nov 07, 2020
Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.
- Name
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- Nov 07, 2020
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
- Enough
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- Nov 07, 2020
A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval 'Carmina Burana' - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.
- Origin
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- Nov 07, 2020
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.
- Memory
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- Nov 07, 2020
The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'
- Problem
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- Nov 07, 2020