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Critics and reviewers can be loosely divided into two camps: Those who never let you forget that they are judge, jury, and if need be, executioner; and those who humble themselves before a poem or novel, waiting for it to reveal its secrets to them.
Michael Dirda
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
Walter Benjamin
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I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a poem and to be given away by a novel.
John Keats
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There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture — that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.
William Kingdon Clifford
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What I try with my own stuff is to work the poem to a slow climax through a series of quiet painful dissonances.
Kenneth Rexroth
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Nor let the critic, if he find the meaning of Camoens in some instances altered, imagine that he has found a blunder in the Translator.... It was not to gratify the dull few, whose greatest pleasure in reading a translation is to see what the author exactly says; it was to give a poem that might live in the English language which was the ambition of the Translator.... And the original is in the hands of the world.
William Julius Mickle
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From the poet's viewpoint a lyric is a poem which embodies a single or simple emotional attitude that expresses directly an uninterrupted mood or inspiration.
Herbert Read
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It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.
Don DeLillo
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Poetry is a subset of a Cosmos, which in itself, is a poem.
Vanna Bonta
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A certain ambiguity of rhythm is one of the beauties of a poem
Anne Ridler
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The so-called obscurity of modernist literature has, of course, a lot to do with the new stress on exegesis. When the overt meaning of a work can no longer be taken for granted, criticism is forced — or seems forced — to undertake the explication of the text of the work before doing anything else. But experience has shown us by now that the drift and shape of an "obscure" poem or novel can be grasped for the purposes of art without being "worked out." Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.
Clement Greenberg
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The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.
Herbert Spencer
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A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.
Hermann Ebbinghaus
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The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.
Marshall McLuhan
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Listening a cultivated person of today that jokes and almost boasts about his scientific ignorance, is as sad as listening a scientist that boasts about not having read any poem.
Carlo Rovelli
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Then read from the treasured volume the poem of thy choice, and lend to the rhyme of the poet the beauty of thy voice.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Thou shalt not make unto thee any ideal, neither of an angel in heaven, nor of a hero in a poem or novel, nor one that is dreamed up or imagined: rather shalt thou love a man as he is.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Childhood and magic are married in this poem inscribed in infinity, like traces on walls or cracks in venerable walls, superimposed posters lacerated by wind, rain and poetry; calligraphy and ideograph intermerge in this equation.... in this sign.
Joan Miró
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The rhythm of a poem ceases the moment the feeling loses its intensity.
The feeling (of intensity) held in a crystal cage, asn an image, sealed and immortalized for our contemplation. Beauty in a wild foray, the form we have created, now, remote from the emotion we experience.
Herbert Read
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There are so many ways to ruin a poem it's quite amazing good ones ever get written.
John Berryman
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I have bathed in the Poem of the Sea, steeped in stars, and milky, devouring the green azures.
Arthur Rimbaud
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We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.
André Maurois
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A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.
Jack Spicer
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A Heroick Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest Work which the Soul of Man is capable to perform.
John Dryden
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Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
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