#poetry

Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours. ↗

— Lascelles Abercrombie

#easier #familiar #glorified #hours #listen

i don't want to hate the president i don't want to go to harvard i don't want to win the pulitzer prize i just want to sit in my bathtub and think about relationships i will never have with people i will never meet and then go lay in my bed with a magnifying glass and count all the stiches in my sheets until i fall asleep and wake up to repeat again. ↗

— Ellen Kennedy

#president

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without. ↗

— A. R. Ammons

#along #comes #every #five #hundred

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. ↗

— Aristotle

#finer #history #more #only #particular

Love is the poetry of the senses. ↗

— Honore de Balzac

#love is #poetry #senses

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell. ↗

— Lascelles Abercrombie

#beauty #difficulty #gravest #important #making

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind. ↗

— Lascelles Abercrombie

#artistic #communities #creation #individual #mind

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses. ↗

— Vicente Aleixandre

#poet #poetry #poses #questions #succession

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language. ↗

— Gaston Bachelard

#future #image #language #newness #opens

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive. ↗