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Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

— James Joyce James Clarence Mangan (1902)

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Poetry

More quotes by James Joyce

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Ulysses (1922)

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

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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

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