Dr. Bordelon's Introduction to Poetry |
Quotes on Poetry This is a start: feel free to send yours in. “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson "Poetry is produced for purposes of comfort, as part of the consolatio philosophiae. It is undertaken as equipment for living, as a ritualistic way of arming us to confront perplexities and risks. It would protect us" (Burke 61). Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 1941. Print. “Poetry is life distilled” Gwendolyn Brooks "Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life:
'You can’t deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching
all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning
obstructions that halt your normal flow.'” Cesare Pavese The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950 Poems "help us to live our lives by providing acute analogues to
everyday experience, and by swinging a lantern ahead of us in the fog of our lives"
(Parini 26)
It is difficult
to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there William Carlos Williams "Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" "Being now resoved to be a poet, I saw everything with a
new purpose; my sphere of attention was suddenly magnified; no kind of
knowledge was to be overlooked. “The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an over-balance of pleasure” William Wordsworth “The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity” Samuel Taylor Coleridge "The poet
is always our contemporary. Our being for the moment is centred
and constricted, as in any violent shock of personal emotion." Virginia Woolf "How Should One Read a Book?" "Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response)." Virginia Woolf Back to top
© David Bordelon 2015 |