John Hollander Quotes
1929–2013 United States
John Hollander (October 28, 1929 – August 17, 2013) was an American poet and literary critic.
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Random John Hollander quote
31 quotes
Major poetry not only 'employs' metaphor, irony and other tropes (and is of them) but always and explicitly or implicitly considers the nature of the trope itself.
The study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design.
Inspiration comes within a framework. A poem that gets out of hand is not a poem.
The warfare between poetry and philosophy certainly started with Plato, who was both poet and philosopher.
For the poet, the biblical sense of 'know' is as much part of nature as the heat of fire, and in the cognative sense as much a given phenomonen as the brightness itself.
I usually seem to finish a poem when I write it down. I may have been carrying the notion around in my head.
I revise very little. I always write in long hand and revise when I type. I test them out when I read them aloud.
Not being a philosopher I've had to work through my feelings and puzzlements in poems.
We and the trees and the way
Back from the fields of play
Lasted as long as we could
No more walks in the wood
Extract-last verse from 'An Old Fashioned Song' in 'Tesserae and other poems (1993)
Winter wields only the spades, Summer brandishes
Hot, black clubs, Spring shower hearts about and Autumn shows
A fall of diamonds in our climate of extremes
Extract from 'Powers of Thirteen (1983)
Great poems are all fables about life.