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If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets.

— Irving Layton The Whole Bloody Bird (1969)

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Poetry

More quotes by Irving Layton

When you argue with your inferiors,
you convince them of only one thing:
they are as clever as you.

The Whole Bloody Bird (1969)

My neighbour
doesn't want to be loved
as much as
he wants to be envied.

The Whole Bloody Bird (1969)

God is indeed dead.
He died of self-horror
when He saw the creature He had made
in His own image.

The Whole Bloody Bird (1969)

Canadians look down on the United States and consider it Hell. They are right to do so. Canada is to the United States what, in Dante's scheme, Limbo is to Hell.

The Whole Bloody Bird (1969)

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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: Irving Layton (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.