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The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.

— Robert Penn Warren

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More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

There are a lot of people who would make better citizens if they were content to be just negatively relevant.

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

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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

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Penn Warren (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.