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poetry is an elusive thing that can neither be hidden nor locked away.

— Nadezhda Mandelstam

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Poetry

More quotes by Nadezhda Mandelstam

The great mass of people thus prefer to glide over the surface of reality, always shirking the effort of trying to understand it.

It is true that "forced labor" is too mild a term for the camps of the twentieth century and that nobody in the world would actually want to go into a camp or gas chamber.

I never ceased to believe in M.'s and Akhmatova's poetry. In our depersonalized world where everything human was silenced, only the poet preserved his "self" and a voice which can still be heard even now.

Now again we are not supposed to remember the past and think-let alone speak about it. (42: Last Letter)

Hope Abandoned (1974)

man must answer for everything, particularly for his own soul.

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