Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience. — Czesław Miłosz Share this quote Post on X Facebook Download image Copy quote Copy link Share… Another quote → Topics PoetryExperience
He who invokes history is always secure.The dead will not rise to witness against him. Daylight (1953)
I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees. Uncollected Poems (1954)
Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic. The Captive Mind (1953)
What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.
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