Nice collection.
Though it's notable how most quoted poets assume that their experience is
universal and that their creative process and output is somehow the most
genuine one - as does Graves here -
"The nucleus of every poem worthy of the name is rhythmically formed in the
poet's mind during a trance-like suspension of his normal habit of thought ,
by the supra-logical reconciliation of his conflicting emotional ideas."
But this is one that resonates with me.
From Bloodaxe's Strong Words by the way - good reading if you haven't
already come across it.
Helen
----- Original Message -----
From: Marcus Bales <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 1:49 PM
Subject: Re: Mike: Emotion in poetry
> On 5 Nov 2003 at 18:39, Sue Scalf wrote:
> > I don't think any poet who is worth his salt would think of poetry as
> > just an emotional outpouring that would necessarily produce something
> > great or even good. Neither is it just something crafted. Craft
> > alone won't do it. Wordsworth called it "Emotion recollected in
> > tranquility." In other words, it is both. Art lies therein. Sue
>
> Prose goes all the way to the margin, poetry doesn't.
> Jeremy Bentham
>
> "Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is
> fundamental. It is the frame that marks the boundary between the
> picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist,
> isolating it from the rest; but at the same time, it recalls- and
> somehow stands for - everything that remains out of the picture. I
> might venture a definition: we consider poetic a production in which
> each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment
> from the general continuum, while it retains a glint of that
> unlimited vastness."
> Italo Calvino,1985
>
> POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the
> Magazines.
> Ambrose Bierce
>
> "In science one tries to tell people, in a way as to be understood by
> everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's
> the exact opposite."
> Paul Dirac
>
> "It is not rhyming and versing that maketh poetry. One may be a poet
> without versing, and a versifyer without poetry."
> Philip Sidney, ~Apologie for Poetrie~
>
> "What is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not.
> We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is."
> Samuel Johnson ~Boswell's Life~
> Things that are true expressed in words that are beautiful.
> Dante
>
> the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the
> help of reason.
> Samuel Johnson
>
> the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
> William Wordsworth
>
> musical thought
> Thomas Carlyle
>
> emotion put into measure.
> Thomas Hardy
>
> If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know
> that it is poetry.
> Emily Dickinson
>
> speech framed...to be heard for its own sake and interest even over
> and above its interest and meaning.
> Gerard Manley Hopkins
>
> a way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget.
> Robert Frost
>
> a revelation in words by means of the words.
> Wallace Stevens
>
> Poetry is prose bewitched.
> Mina Loy
>
> not the assertion that something is true, but the making of that
> truth more fully real to us.
> T. S. Eliot
>
> the clear expression of mixed feelings.
> W. H. Auden
>
> the body of linguistic constructions that men usually refer to as
> poems.
> J. V. Cunningham
>
> hundreds of things coming together at the right moment.
> Elizabeth Bishop
>
> A poem is something that penetrates for an instant into the
> unconscious.
> Robert Bly
>
> Poetry is the synthesis of hyancinths and bisquits. --Carl Sandburg
>
> Poetry is the deification of reality. --Edith Sitwell
>
> the story of a soul. --Czeslaw Milosz
>
> getting something right in language. --Howard Nemerov
>
> Poetry is the great stimulation of life... Poetry is redemption from
> pessimism.
> Susan Howe
> A poem is anything said in such a way or put on the page in such a
> way as to invite from the hearer or reader a certain kind of
> attention.
> William Stafford
>
> I would define poetry as the rhythmical creation of beauty.
> Edgar Allan Poe
>
> Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best
> order.
> S. T. Coleridge
>
> The art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion
> of the imagination...
> Macaulay
>
> The record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest
> minds...
> Shelley
>
> Speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and
> above its interest of meaning.
> Gerard Manley Hopkins
>
> The rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from and overclothed
> blindness to a naked vision...
> Dylan Thomas
>
> Language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction,
> something that can not be said...
> E. A. Robinson
>
> The art of saying everything and reducing it to nothing...
> Barbara Hyett
>
> POEM: a composition designed to convey a vivid and imaginative sense
> of experience, characterized by the use of condensed language chosen
> for its sound and suggestive power as well as its meaning, and by the
> use of such literary techniques as structured meter, natural
> cadences, rhyme, or metaphor.
> American Heritage Dictionary
>
> A poem is "a sonorous molded shape of form".
> Osip Mandelstam
>
> A verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed
> as a table or a motorcyle.
> W. H. Auden
>
> Poetry amounts to arranging words with the greatest specific gravity
> in the most effective and externally inevitable sequence.
> Joseph Brodsky
>
> A poem is an instant of lucidity in which the entire organism
> participates.
> Charles Simic
>
> A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it... by way of
> the poem itself, all the way over to the reader.
> Charles Olson
>
> A momentary stay against confusion. --Robert Frost
> Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur
> Lewis Carroll
>
> Poetry is not prosody. It is not technique. Poetry is born out of
> revelation to one's self of the meaning of your own life.
> Stanley Kunitz
>
> Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's
> bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat.
> Osbert Sitwell
>
> Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes
> familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
> Shelley
>
> Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels
> with ourselves we make poetry.
> William Butler Yeats
>
> You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
> Mario Cuomo
>
> The objects the imitator represents are actions.
> -- Aristotle
>
> Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion;
> it is not the expression of personality but an escape from
> personality.
> T. S. Eliot
>
> Literature is language charged with meaning.
> Ezra Pound
>
> A man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and examining a
> few of the best poems than by meandering about among a great many. --
> Ezra Pound
>
> True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd,
> What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.
> Alexander Pope
>
> Silence can be complex too, but you do not get far with silence.
> William Carlos Williams
>
> Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep
> watch over my thoughts, because if a line of poetry strays into my
> memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
> A. E. Housman
>
> For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
> -- T. S. Eliot
>
> No data without experiment.
> Sophocles, tr. Ezra Pound
>
> Say what you will in two
> Words and get through.
> Long, frilly
> Palaver is silly.
> Marie-Francoise-Catherine de Beauveau, tr. Ezra Pound
>
> Interviewer: Doesn't it embarrass you to see Bobby trying to learn
> how to play slide on stage? Jerry Garcia: Um, yeah. but the point
> is, it doesn't embarrass him.
>
> Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.
> P B Shelley
>
> It is difficult
> to get the news from poems
> yet men die miserably every day
> for lack
> of what is found there.
> -- William Carlos Williams
>
> ... the great end
> Of poesy, that it should be a friend
> To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.
> -- Keats
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