#poetry

Either all lights are turned off or one inner light is missing. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #inner #light #lights #literature

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been. ↗

— Lascelles Abercrombie

#broadly #epic #epic poetry #independently #invented

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

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. ↗

— A. R. Ammons

#leads #our #poetry #rational #refreshed

Envy won't make you a better poet. ↗

— Katerina Stoykova Klemer

#envy #personal-growth #poetry #relationships #writing

Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body. The empirical use of already established language should be distinguished from its creative use. Empirical language can only be the result of creative language. Speech in the sense of empirical language - that is, the opportune recollection of a preestablished sign – is not speech in respect to an authentic language. It is, as Mallarmé said, the worn coin placed silently in my hand. True speech, on the contrary - speech which signifies, which finally renders "l'absente de tous bouquets" present and frees the sense captive in the thing - is only silence in respect to empirical usage, for it does not go so far as to become a common noun. Language is oblique and autonomous, and if it sometimes signifies a thought or a thing directly, that is only a secondary power derived from its inner life. Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense. ↗

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

#phenomenology #poetry #silence #life

In most cases the name is unpoetical, although the fact is poetical. In the case of Smith, the name is so poetical that it must be an arduous and heroic matter for the man to live up to it. The name of Smith is the name of the one trade that even kings respected; it could claim half the glory of that arma virumque which all epics acclaimed. The spirit of the smithy is so close to the spirit of song that it has mixed in a million poems, and every blacksmith is a harmonious blacksmith. Even the village children feel that in some dim way the smith is poetic, as the grocer and the cobbler are not poetic, when they feast on the dancing sparks and deafening blows in the cavern of that creative violence. The brute repose of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the weirdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#nature

Laura remarked that science was dependent upon poetry, that all scientific description was metaphoric. ↗

— Anne Rice

#science #science

No non-poetic account of reality can be complete. ↗

— John Myhill

#god-s-whisper-creation-s-thunder #john-d-barrow #john-myhill #metaphysics #mysticism