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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #poe
I caution against communication because once language exist only to convey information, it is dying. In news articles the relation of the words to the subject is a strong one. The relation of the words to the writer is weak. (Since the majority of your reading has been newspapers, you are used to seeing language function this way). When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves: The relation of the word to the subject must weaken – the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength. This is probably the hardest thing about writing poems In a poem you make something up, say for example a town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t you may be in the wrong business. Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse 40 years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn’t. RICHARD HUGO Public versus private poets: With public poets the intellectual and emotional contents of the words are the same for the reader as for the writer. With the private poet, the words, at least certain key words, mean something to the poet they don’t mean to the reader. A sensitive reader perceives this relation of poet to word and in a way that relation – the strange way the poet emotionally possesses his vocabulary – is one of the mysteries and preservative forces of the art. If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions. In fact, most poets write the same poem over and over. (Wallace Stevens was honest enough not to try to hide it. Frost’s statement that he tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it couldn’t be). ↗
Do I Love You" I stand in the night and stare up at a lone star, wondering what love means. You whisper your desire, Do I love you? I dare say yes. But my eyes drift back to that solitary star; my mind plagued with intimate uncertainty. What art thou, Love? Tell me. I contemplate what I know - the qualities that love doth not possess. Love lifts no cruel or unkind hand, for it seeketh no harm. It shirks from constraints and demands, for tyranny is not love. A boisterous voice never crosses love's lips, for to speak with thunder chases its very presence from the heart. Love inflicts no pain, no fear, no misery, but conquers all such foes. It is said that love is not selfish, yet it does not guilt those who are. On a heart unwillingly given it stakes no claim. Love is nothing from Pandora's box - no evil, sin, or sorrow unleashed on this world. My eyes glimmer as the star I gaze upon twinkles with brightness that I do not possess. I recognize my smallness - my ignorance of the One whose hands placed that star in the heavens for me. He is love. By His own mouth He proclaimed it. Again the whispered question hits my ear, Do you love me? I dare say yes. But my eyes squint tight, wishing on a lonely star, wondering what love means. ↗
Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah, Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decesion of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending into your bosom Stupid relationship inflted in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all into pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for poetry except suicide Shubha Let me enter into the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora Into the absurdity of woeless effort In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart Why wasn't I lost in my mother's urethra? Why wasn't I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition? Why wasn't I mixed in the ovum-flux or in the phlegm? With her eyes shut supine beneath me I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize Shubha Women could be treacherous even after unfolding a helpless appeareance Today it seems there is nothing so treacherous as Women and Art Now my ferocious heart is rinning towards an impossible death Vertigoes of water are coming up to my neck from the pierced earth I will die Oh what are these happening within me? I am failing to fetch out my hand and my palm From the dried sperms on my trousers spreading wings 300000 children are gliding toward the district of Shubha's bosom Millions of needles are now running from my blood into Poetry Now the smuggling of my obstinate leg is trying to plunge Into the death killer sex-wig entangled in the hypnotic kingdom of words In violent mirrors on each wall of the room I am observing After letting loose a few naked Malay, his unestablished scramblings. ↗
Love, is it morning risen or night deceased That makes the mirth of this triumphant east? Is it bliss given or bitterness put by That makes most glad men's hearts at love's high feast? Grief smiles, joy weeps, that day should live and die. "Is it with soul's thirst or with body's drouth That summer yearns out sunward to the south, With all the flowers that when thy birth drew nigh Were molten in one rose to make thy mouth? O love, what care though day should live and die? "Is the sun glad of all love on earth, The spirit and sense and work of things and worth? Is the moon sad because the month must fly And bring her death that can but bring back birth? For all these things as day must live and die. "Love, is it day that makes thee thy delight Or thou that seest day made out of thy light? Love, as the sun and sea are thou and I, Sea without sun dark, sun without sea bright; The sun is one though day should live and die. "O which is elder, night or light, who knows? And life or love, which first of these twain grows? For life is born of love to wail and cry, And love is born of life to heal his woes, And light of night, that day should live and die. "O sun of heaven above the wordly sea, O very love, what light is this of thee! My sea of soul is deep as thou art high, But all thy light is shed through all of me, As love's through love, while day shall live and die. ↗
#art
The Author To Her Book Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth did'st by my side remain, Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad exposed to public view, Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge, Where errors were not lessened (all may judge). At thy return my blushing was not small, My rambling brat (in print) should mother call. I cast thee by as one unfit for light, The visage was so irksome in my sight, Yet being mine own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, if so I could. I washed thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw. I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet, Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet. In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find. In this array, 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam. In critic's hands, beware thou dost not come, And take thy way where yet thou art not known. If for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none; And for thy mother, she alas is poor, Which caused her thus to send thee out of door. ↗
#art
Nothing is a masterpiece - a real masterpiece - till it's about two hundred years old. A picture is like a tree or a church, you've got to let it grow into a masterpiece. Same with a poem or a new religion. They begin as a lot of funny words. Nobody knows whether they're all nonsense or a gift from heaven. And the only people who think anything of 'em are a lot of cranks or crackpots, or poor devils who don't know enough to know anything. Look at Christianity. Just a lot of floating seeds to start with, all sorts of seeds. It was a long time before one of them grew into a tree big enough to kill the rest and keep the rain off. And it's only when the tree has been cut into planks and built into a house and the house has got pretty old and about fifty generations of ordinary lumpheads who don't know a work of art from a public convenience, have been knocking nails in the kitchen beams to hang hams on, and screwing hooks in the walls for whips and guns and photographs and calendars and measuring the children on the window frames and chopping out a new cupboard under the stairs to keep the cheese and murdering their wives in the back room and burying them under the cellar flags, that it begins even to feel like a religion. And when the whole place is full of dry rot and ghosts and old bones and the shelves are breaking down with old wormy books that no one could read if they tried, and the attic floors are bulging through the servants' ceilings with old trunks and top-boots and gasoliers and dressmaker's dummies and ball frocks and dolls-houses and pony saddles and blunderbusses and parrot cages and uniforms and love letters and jugs without handles and bridal pots decorated with forget-me-nots and a piece out at the bottom, that it grows into a real old faith, a masterpiece which people can really get something out of, each for himself. And then, of course, everybody keeps on saying that it ought to be pulled down at once, because it's an insanitary nuisance. ↗
It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them. ↗
Poetry is the wailing of a broken heart―the etched sorrows of despairing souls. These artful words are an exclamation in rare colors expressed noiselessly on parchment. Poetry is the unheard cry of a budding flower, wilting. It is a humble, lucent tear shed with meaning. It is the lovely portrayal of ugliness and the bitter edge of sweet. Poetry speaks to the spirit by piercing understanding. It interprets all senseless truths―beauty, love, emotion―into sensible scrawl. Poetry is vague affirmation and bewildering clarification. Like the most poignant of emotions, we understand the essence but cannot adequately do it verbal justice, crippled by inherently weak tongues. A spiritual soothsayer, poetry is the closest thing to expression of feelings unutterable. ↗
