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Etymology is perennially fascinating because it revives the forgotten poetry of the everyday.

— Henry Hitchings

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Poetry

More quotes by Henry Hitchings

Early experience conditions adult life; childhood is the precinct in which we learn the rituals of maturity.

The eighteenth century was seized by a rage for order, manifest in a range of new phenomena: the price tag, standardised weights and measures, the proliferation of signposts on public highways, the increased use of account books and calendars.

Languages, we know, do not stand still. New words are borrowed or invented. Others become obsolete. Morphology alters. So does pronunciation. Words are tools we use to communicate; they bend to our needs. Many change their meanings. Some acquire prestige, and others are degraded.

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Henry Hitchings (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.