32 quotes
We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us.
The Life of Poetry (1949)
Poetry is foreign to us, we do not let it enter our daily lives.
The Life of Poetry (1949)
The continuity of film, in which the writer deals with a track of images moving at a given rate of speed, and a separate sound-track which is joined arbitrarily to the image-track, is closer to the continuity of poetry than anything else in art.
The Life of Poetry (1949)
The world of this creation, and its poetry, is not yet born. The possibility before us is that now we enter upon another time, again to choose. Its birth is tragic, but the process is ahead: we must be able to turn a time of war into a time of building.
The Life of Poetry (1949)
The use of truth is its communication. (p 27)
The Life of Poetry (1949)
Poetry is not; or seems not to be.
The Life of Poetry (1949)
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry
The Life of Poetry (1949)
peace is not lack of war, but a drive toward unity
The Life of Poetry (1949)
We are against war and the sources of war. We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.
They are everyday, these sources, as the sources of peace are everyday, infinite and commonplace as a look, as each new sun.
The Life of Poetry (1949)
How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that — to an adolescent — was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves?
The Life of Poetry (1949)
The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is the way we feel and the way we remember. (p 23)
The Life of Poetry (1949)
The statement of ideas in a poem may have to do with logic. More profoundly, it may be identified with the emotional progression of the poem, in terms of the music and images, so that the poem is alive throughout.
Another, more fundamental statement in poetry, is made through the images themselves — those declarations, evocative, exact, and musical, which move through time and are the actions of a poem.
The Life of Poetry (1949)