That's the way I write a poem -- getting a small piece of it in my hands and pulling it out and not knowing whether it is a man or a woman. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
- Robert Frost
Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge, or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight it's own modest buds and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression. I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.
- Charles Lamb to Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Mr. Stevens said that poetry was his way of making the world palatable. "It's the way of making one's experience, almost wholly inexplicable, acceptable," he said. In recent years he felt a sense of imminent tragedy in the world, and to this situation a poet addresses himself, he said. "What he gets is not necessarily a solution but some defense against it," Mr. Stevens remarked.
In "The Necessary Angel," a book of his essays published in 1951, the poet said: "My final point, then, is that imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos."
- Wallace Stevens
If poetry is intuition and expression, the fusion of sound and imagery, what is the material which takes on the form of sound and imagery? It is the whole man: the man who thinks and wills, and loves, and hates; who is strong and weak, sublime and pathetic, good and wicked; man in the exultation and agony of living; and together with the man, integral with him, it is all nature in its perpetual of labor of evolution. Poetry is the triumph of contemplation. Poetic genius chooses a strait path in which passion is calmed and calm is passionate.
- Croce's Oxford lecture 1933
And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable.
¨CEmerson
First I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
Second Its touches of beauty should never be halfway, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of Imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it. And this leads me to:
Another axiom -- That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not to come at all.
- John Keats
True art . . . is not intended as a mere passing fancy; its earnest endeavor is not to transport man into a mere momentary dream of freedom, but rather to make him actually free, and to do so by awakening, exercising and developing within him his power to achieve an objective distance from the sensible world, which otherwise weighs down upon us like a dead object, pressing us like a blind force. This distance gives us the power to transform the material world into the free work of our own intellect, and to exert dominion over it through ideas.
- Schiller
- posted on 10/12/2004
Thanks for sharing those ideas, this is more straightforward
than Emerson's long essay (still haven't finished)...
But essay has essay's reason for existence.
Let me cut it more sharp...
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.It is the whole man: Poetry is the triumph of contemplation. Poetic genius chooses a strait path in which passion is calmed and calm is passionate.
- Robert Frost
I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.
- Charles Lamb to Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Mr. Stevens said that poetry was his way of making the world palatable.
...that imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos."
- Wallace Stevens
- Croce's Oxford lecture 1933
And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable.
¨CEmerson
First I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
Second Its touches of beauty should never be halfway... But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it. And this leads me to:
Another axiom -- That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not to come at all.
- John Keats
...but rather to make him actually free, and to do so by awakening, exercising and developing within him his power to achieve an objective distance from the sensible world...
- Schiller
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