Laura Riding - Poetry Quotes

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What is science? yard-measure and scale to philosophy, expert-accountant, bank clerk. What is poetry? miserable, ill-fed, underpaid, unionized labourer, pleased to oblige, grateful for work, flattering himself that poverty makes him an aristocrat.

Laura Riding
Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.

Laura Riding
Yet what representative trio do not make a mad trio? Blake, Mrs. Aphra Behn, Zeno - not a typical but a representative threesome... Things do not go in simple pairs. Poetry is not a case of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Bridges and Masefield, Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot. Poetry is some awkward trio - like Caedmon, Oliver Goldsmith, Enda St. Vincent Millay. So with the novel.

Laura Riding
When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation.... Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame.

Laura Riding
... poets are sensitive to the challenge 'What is the moral justification of poetry?' because they are conscious of the intrinsic goodness of poetry. Goody-goody humanitarian causes draw them easily into membership by making them wince at the notion of all the injustices prevalent in the world of physical consciousness. Let it be declared as clearly as possible that the goodness of poetry is not moral goodness, the goodness of temporal action, but the goodness of thought, the loving exercise of the will in the pursuit of truth.

Laura Riding
Poetry is a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep.

Laura Riding
Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

Laura Riding