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However rootedly national it may be, poetry is less and less the prisoner of its own language.

— Ted Hughes Poetry International Programme note (1967)

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Poetry

More quotes by Ted Hughes

We now give more serious weight to the words of a country's poets than to the words of its politicians — though we know the latter may interfere more drastically with our lives.

Poetry International Programme note (1967)

The idea of global unity is not new, but the absolute necessity of it has only just arrived, like a sudden radical alteration of the sun, and we shall have to adapt or disappear.

Poetry International Programme note (1967)

The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date;
A life subdued to its instrument.

Lupercal (1960)

The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold:
Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.

Lupercal (1960)

The brassy wood-pigeons
Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun
Rises upon a world well-tried and old.

Wodwo (1967)

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