Portal:Poetry/Quotes archive/2006 archive

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This is an archive of article summaries that have appeared in the Quotes section of Portal:Poetry in 2006. For past archives, see the complete archive page.

Week 26 2006
“ I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language. ”
W. H. Auden
“ A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. ”
Robert Frost
“ To have great poets, there must be great audiences. ”
Walt Whitman
Archive


Week 27 2006
“ A good poem is one in which the form of the verse and the joining of its two parts seem light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed. ”
Basho
“ Art is a house that tries to be haunted. ”
Emily Dickinson
“ The business of poetry is to harmonise the sadness of the universe ”
A. E. Housman
Archive


Week 28 2006
“ Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending;

Many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse

 ”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Archive


Week 29 2006
“ There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ”
Robert Graves
“ In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on. ”
Robert Frost
“ There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of the happy time in misery. ”
Dante
Archive


Week 30 2006
“ No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master. ”
Ben Jonson
“ Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare

To dig the dust enclosed here
Blessed be the man that spares these stones
And cursed be he that moves my bones

 ”
William Shakespeare's epitaph
Archive


Week 31 2006
“ Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. ”
Carl Sandburg
“ Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage- Minds innocent and quite take that for a hermitage. ”
From Richard Lovelace's To Althea, from Prison
Archive


Week 32 2006
“ There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ”
Robert Graves
“ Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship. ”
Ismail Kadare
Archive


Week 33 2006
“ Apes are apes though clothed in scarlet ”
Robert Graves
“ We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;

But thereof come in the end despondency and madness

 ”
William Wordsworth
Archive


Week 34 2006
“ Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money. ”
Moliere
“ And mighty Poets in their misery dead ”
William Wordsworth
Archive


Week 35 2006
“ Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it. ”
G.K. Chesterton
“ Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old Time is still a-flying. And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying. ”
Robert Herrick
Archive


Week 36 2006
“ Perhaps you should say something

A bit more interesting than what you mean.

 ”
Peter Porter
“ I tell myself don't wreck a good phrase simply to boost sense ”
Geoffrey Hill, from Without Title
Archive


Week 37 2006
“ He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love. ”
John Dryden on John Donne
“ Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!

Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord's anointed temple and stole thence
The life 'o the building!

 ”
Macduff, in the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare upon discoving the slain body of the king.
Archive


Week 38 2006
“ It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll; I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. ”
William Ernest Henley
“ A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer. ”
Robert Frost
“ The world in all doth but two nations bear,

The good, the bad; and these mixed everywhere.

 ”
Andrew Marvell
Archive


Week 39 2006
“ So the heart be right, it is no matter which way the head lieth. ”
Sir Walter Ralegh
“ Thou shall know by experience how salt the savor is of others' bread, and how sad a path it is to climb and descend another's stairs. ”
Dante
“ It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. ”
from Beowolf
Archive


Week 40 2006
“ Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ”
Leonard Cohen
“ A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ”
Oscar Wilde
Archive


Week 41 2006
“ A good poem is one in which the form of the verse and the joining of its two parts seem light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed. ”
Basho
“ Art is a house that tries to be haunted. ”
Emily Dickinson
“ The business of poetry is to harmonise the sadness of the universe ”
A. E. Housman
Archive


Week 42 2006
“ Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. ”
T. S. Eliot
“ Adam, well may we labour, still to dress
This garden, still to tend plant, herb, and flower.		 ”
John Milton in Paradise Lost
Archive


Week 43 2006
“ Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. ”
Carl Sandburg
“ Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage- Minds innocent and quite take that for a hermitage. ”
From Richard Lovelace's To Althea, from Prison
Archive


Week 44 2006
“ Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought. ”
Matsuo Bashō
“ Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me. ”
Sigmund Freud
Archive


Week 45 2006
“ Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending;

Many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse.

 ”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Week 46 2006
“ I have one of two choices — stay in the post office and go crazy ... or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I decided to starve. ”
Charles Bukowski


Week 47 2006

The Parasite's Defense

In 1964 Soviet authorities charged Joseph Brodsky with "тунеядство" — parasitism. From the transcript of his trial smuggled to the West:

Judge: And what is your profession in general?
Brodsky: Poet translator.
Judge: Who recognized you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?
Brodsky: No one. And who enrolled me in the ranks of humanity?
Judge: Did you study this?
Brodsky: This?
Judge: To become a poet. You did not try to finish high school where they prepare, where they teach?
Brodsky: I didn’t think you could get this from school.
Judge: How then?
Brodsky: I think that it ... comes from God.[1]

[edit] References

  1. ^ The original transcript reads: Судья: А вообще какая ваша специальность? Бродский: Поэт. Поэт-переводчик. Судья: А кто это признал, что вы поэт? Кто причислил вас к поэтам? Бродский: Никто. (Без вызова). А кто причислил меня к роду человеческому? Судья: А вы учились этому? Бродский: Чему? Судья: Чтобы быть поэтом? Не пытались кончить Вуз, где готовят... где учат... Бродский: Я не думал, что это дается образованием. Судья: А чем же? Бродский: Я думаю, это... (растерянно)... от Бога... The translation is taken from Remembering Joseph Brodsky by Cissie Dore Hill at Hoover Institution Archives


Week 48 2006
There are certain arts which employ all the means which I have mentioned, such as rhythm and tune and metre--dithyrambic and "nomic" poetry, for example, and tragedy too and comedy. The difference here is that some use all these at once, others use now one now another.
-Aristotle, Poetics
God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
-William Carlos Williams


Week 49 2006
“ Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked poetry ‘cept a beadle on boxin’ day, or Warren’s blackin’ or Rowland’s oil, or some o’ them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy. ”
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers


Week 50 2006

"I perceived that we in the West were indeed barbarians and foreign devils, and that we knew scarcely anything about poetry." -- Allen Upward (1863 - 1926), diplomat and poet, on his introduction to Chinese literature

Week 51 2006

"He [the poet] must divest himself of the prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same: he must therefore content himself with the slow progress of his name, contemn the applause of his own time, and commit his claims to the justice of posterity. He must write as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations; as being superior to time and place."

— spoken by Imlac in Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, Chapter X

"Enough! Thou hast convinced me, that no human being can ever be a poet."

— spoken by the Prince, Rasselas, Chapter XI

Week 52 2006

Q: How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

A: A poem is a compact sequence of unpredictable images. I remember reading about a B-baller called "Half Man Half Amazing". That phrase alone is a poem.

— Vietnamese-American poet Linh Dinh, interview at "Here Comes Everybody" blog, December 14, 2004

(http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2004/12/linh-dinh-is-author-of-two-collections.html)