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Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
John Taylor Gatto
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Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaning of a passage in his poem. He replied, "God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows."
Cesare Lombroso
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Reminded of favorite poem by Wendy Cope which goes: At Christmas little children sing and merry bells jingle. The cold winter air makes our hands and faces tingle. And happy families go to church and cheerily they mingle, And the whole business is unbelievably dreadful if you're single.
Helen Fielding
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Writing a poem for me is putting myself in a very odd state indeed in which I am excessively sensitive to interruption—I can hear, or think I can hear, people doing disturbing things behind shut doors three houses off—and really suffer very painfully, as though I were performing a major operation on my own skull.
Robert Graves
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I have a poem about macular degeneration. Which I won't read.
Fleur Adcock
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We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
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No man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith.
Louis L'Amour
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There was a very cautious man Who never laughed or played He never risked, he never tried, He never sang or prayed. And when he on day passed away, His insurance was denied, For since he never really lived, They claimed he never really died. (Anonymous poem)
John C. Maxwell
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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
Donald Hall
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Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.
Patti Smith
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Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.
Emil Cioran
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A day which passed without a poem from my pen I considered lost and misused.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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A man cannot write a poem or a story that will transform the whole nature of man, his reality and his truth, making them greater and nobler.
William Saroyan
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The poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading. But the thinking will come afterwards.
Sara Teasdale
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To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.
Maxine Kumin
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Ireland is not at all a simple place, and in many ways it is spare and sad. It has no wealth, no power, no stability, no influence, no fashion, no size. Its only real arts are song and drama and poem. But Limerick alone has two thousand ruined castles and surely that many practicing poets.
Shana Alexander
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Poetry is the most bodliy of arts, the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm in the individual's chest to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.
Robert Pinsky
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Suppose, deep down, you suspect that you are dull, and your public works are a form of vengeance. You talk a good poem, and think by numbers. Once upon a time, you were interesting; then Mother died and you had to give it up.
John Leonard
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When he went blundering back to God, His songs half written, his work half done, Who knows what paths his bruised feet trod, What hills of peace or pain he won? I hope God smiled and took his hand, And said, "Poor truant, passionate fool! Life's book is hard to understand: Why couldst thou not remain at school?" A poem by Charles Hanson Towne
Mitch Albom
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In Science the paramount appeal is to the Intellect — its purpose being instruction; in Art, the paramount appeal is to the Emotions — its purpose being pleasure. A work of Art must of course indirectly appeal to the Intellect, and a work of Science will also indirectly appeal to the Feelings; nevertheless a poem on the stars and a treatise on astronomy have distinct aims and distinct methods. But having recognised the broadly-marked differences, we are called upon to ascertain the underlying resemblances. Logic and Imagination belong equally to both. It is only because men have been attracted by the differences that they have overlooked the not less important affinities.
George Henry Lewes
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That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.
Li-Young Lee
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A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.
Mark Strand
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The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.
John Ciardi
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A poem therefore is to be defined as a structure of words whose sound constitutes a rhythmical unity, complete in itself, irrefragable, unanalyzable, completing its symbolic references within the ambit of its sound effects.
Herbert Read
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I often think of a poem as a door that opens into a room where I want to go. But to go in here is to enter where my own suffering exists as an almost unheard low note in the music, amplified, almost unbearable.
Minnie Bruce Pratt
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Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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