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Poetry, like Art, is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.

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Notes from Wikiquote

Hail, American Development (New York: Definition Press, 1968)

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Poetry

More quotes by Eli Siegel

Every person in order to respect himself has to see the world as beautiful or good or acceptable.

Self and World (1957)

Children are really desperate to see the world as pleasing; and their desperateness is part of a wise hope.

Self and World (1957)

There is a disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.

Self and World (1957)

Aesthetics is related to every particular conflict; to everyday conflict.

Everything Has to Do with Hardness and Softness (1969)

All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

Everything Has to Do with Hardness and Softness (1969)

All Eli Siegel quotes →

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