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A poem works or fails to work; no amount of argufying can convert an experienced reader.

— Michael Schmidt Getting poetry published', in, Writer's and Artist's Yearbook (2004)

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Poetry

More quotes by Michael Schmidt

A living poem can energise another poem at five hundred years distance, or across the other side of the world.

Poetry is a collaborative art, and yet—as it is being created—the most solitary and 'individual' of activities.

In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.

Poetry is a process, a form of discovery, which if it serves a cause, transcends it.

Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it.

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