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Poetry changes with every generation, but it does not improve or progress. It just changes its styles, trappings and some of its obsessions, but we can still enjoy Sappho and Homer; they are today's news as much as when they were written or recited.

— Marge Piercy My Life, My Body (2015)

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Poetry

More quotes by Marge Piercy

Doorways are sacred to women for we
are the doorways of life and we must choose
what comes in and what goes out.

fragment of poem in Moon Is Always Female (1980)

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

Each good novel has a vision of its world that informs what is put in and what is left out.

Life of Prose and Poetry — An Inspiring Combination (1999)

Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break.

Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1973)

If you have contempt for people and think they cannot know what they want and need, who the hell is the revolution for?

The Grand Coolie Damn (1969)

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