- Great
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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
- How
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- Nov 07, 2020
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
There are things that neuroscience is useful for in terms of understanding behavior, but there are also things it is not all that useful for, like understanding the nuances of our reactions to poetry.
- Money
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- Nov 07, 2020
Civic poetry is public poetry. It is political poetry. It is about the hard stuff of life: money, crime, gender, corporate excess, racial injustice. It gives expression not just to our rites but also to our problems and even our values; these poems are not about rustic vacations.
- Dissecting
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- Nov 07, 2020
Civic poetry offers us a way to think and talk about issues that so much of public speech ignores, to make them new by dissecting and repurposing public speech, prying its falsehoods from its half-truths. It is fighting for its right to critique our would-be democracy.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.
- Raising
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- Nov 07, 2020
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
- Journalism
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- Nov 07, 2020
For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.
- Think
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- Nov 07, 2020
I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.
- Gospels
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- Nov 07, 2020
The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.
- Night
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- Nov 07, 2020
At eight, I made a commitment to poetry. Until then, I thought I'd be a policeman. But I went a whole night without sleeping, and the next day the world had changed. It needed a different language.
- Sky
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- Nov 07, 2020
One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn finally came up - the comfortable blue sky, the familiar world returning - I could think of no other way to express my relief than through poetry. I made a decision there and then that it was what I wanted to do. Every time I pulled a wishbone, it was what I asked for.
- Light
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- Nov 07, 2020
If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything.
- Name
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- Nov 07, 2020
One of the rules of Greek lament poetry is that it mustn't mention the dead by name in case of invoking a ghost. Maybe the 'Iliad,' crowded with names, is more than a poem. Maybe it's a dangerous piece of the brightness of both this world and the next.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.
- Discipline
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- Nov 07, 2020