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One crosses the brink of literalness into poetry by desiring , noticing, fixing on something and wondering what to make of it.

— John Hollander

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Poetry

More quotes by John Hollander

Contrastive stress is very important in English, as poems are full of invisible italicised contrasts of this kind.

The building blocks of poetry itself are elements if fiction -fable, 'image', metaphor-all the material if the nonliteral.

English Prosody has tended to be a subject for cranks.

'Poetic form' is a very deep matter that covers much more than phonological or typological pattern.

The blueprints of verse can be used to build things made of literal, or nonpoetic material, which is why most verse is not poetry.

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