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Poetry Magnum Opus

The Quotation Thread


badger11

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When this Verse was first dictated to me, I consider'd a monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakspeare, and all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Riming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rime itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences and number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and the prosaic for inferior parts; all are necessary to each other. Poetry fetter'd fetters the Human Race.

 

William Blake

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Not a whisper comes out of him of the old stock talk and rhyme of poetry—not the first recognition of gods or goddesses, or Greece or Rome. No breath of Europe....

 

Walt Whitman

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you must not slovenly read it with the eyes but with your ears as if the paper were declaiming it at you. ...Stress is the life of it.

 

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Meter alone is too limited and monotonous to convey meaning through sound. The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless.

-- Robert Frost

Here is a link to an index of my works on this site: tonyv's Member Archive topic

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As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome

 

Ezra Pound

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It takes six or eight years to get educated in one's art, and another ten to get rid of that education.

 

Ezra Pound

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The only thing that does strike me as odd, looking back, is that what society has been willing to pay me for is being a librarian. You get medals and prizes and honorary this and thats -- and flattering interviews -- but if you turned round and said, Right, if I’m so good, give me an indexlinked permanent income equal to what I can get for being an undistinguished university administrator -- well, reason would remount its throne pretty quickly.

-- Philip Larkin

Here is a link to an index of my works on this site: tonyv's Member Archive topic

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No device is important in itself. Writing poetry is playing off the natural rhythms and word order of speech against the artificialities of rhyme and meter.

-- Philip Larkin

Here is a link to an index of my works on this site: tonyv's Member Archive topic

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I have chosen subjects from common life, and endeavoured to bring my language near to the real language of men

 

William Wordsworth

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...poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind

 

William Wordsworth

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  • 2 weeks later...
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

 

Robert Frost

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth - Jean Cocteau

History of Macedonia

 

 

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goldenlangur

"The word is a bundle and meaning sticks out of it in various directions" -- Osip Mandelstam (1891 - 1938)

goldenlangur

 

 

Even a single enemy is too many and a thousand friends too few - Bhutanese saying.

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“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen”

-- Leonardo da Vinci

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth - Jean Cocteau

History of Macedonia

 

 

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I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

 

Keats

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A poem is about what the poet decides. A poem is about what the reader decides. A poem is about what the poem decides. A poem is a compromise.

 

badge :0)

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goldenlangur

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.” ― Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

goldenlangur

 

 

Even a single enemy is too many and a thousand friends too few - Bhutanese saying.

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goldenlangur

“As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.”

 

“Poetry might be described as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”

 

 

W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

goldenlangur

 

 

Even a single enemy is too many and a thousand friends too few - Bhutanese saying.

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'Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.' - Charles Simic (1938 - )

goldenlangur

 

 

Even a single enemy is too many and a thousand friends too few - Bhutanese saying.

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  • 6 months later...
"Rhetoric comes from the quarrel one has with the world. Poetry comes from the quarrel one has with oneself." - WB Yeats
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  • 11 months later...

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