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My function has been to remain devoted to finding ways in which poetry itself may continue to express alternatives to unsatisfactory conditions.

— Stephen Gray

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Poetry

More quotes by Stephen Gray

The poetry is the centre of it all, it’s the most important to me, it’s the work I’d like to stand or fall by.

Yes, I felt that if I was a writer, I should write my way out of all
that, otherwise I was dead.

If asked to summarise what I feel my main preoccupations in poetry have been up to this great divide, I would have to reply: love and apartheid. The interrelationship between the two has been my chief subject matter (what else could it have been?)

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