accuracy

He was a poet and hated the approximate.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge

What's poetry for?

Poetry is all beauty that cannot be explained and needs no explanation.

—Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist, translated by Christopher Maurer

poetry and philosophy

No man was ever yet a great poet who was not at the same time a great philosopher, for poetry is the blossom and fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

contemporaries

Of course. This very day, there’s Bernard Shaw, Stravinsky, Picasso, Chaplin.

—César Vallejo, “Roundabout Artistic Freedom,” Autopsy on Surrealism (Art on the Line #3, Curbstone Press, 1982)

new taken for old

The ‘new’ poetry based on new words or new metaphors distinguishes itself by its pedantic novelty and by its baroque complication. The new poetry based on new sensibility is, on the contrary, simple and human and, at first glance, might be taken for old, or not even invite speculation as to whether it is or is not modern.

—César Vallejo, “New Poetry,” Autopsy on Surrealism (Art on the Line #3, Curbstone Press, 1982)

pebble or galaxy

[Yvor] Winters is able to prove—demonstrate irrefutably with step-by-step arguments and copious illustrations from line and stanza—that our favorite poets are idiots, and in the process show us just why we like them so much.


A poem is an existent; it has the same status as a pebble or a galaxy. It has no relationship to nature, but only to other existents within nature. And what I think is that any work of art not informed by a bold and determined regard for this equivalency and its effects is deficient intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, and cannot speak to the discerning contemporary sensibility. Let the fundamentalists rage. Poets are quiet seekers unwilling to be deluded.

—Hayden Carruth,“The Nature of Art”(1993)

Tagore

Thirteen years ago, I had the slightly terrifying honor of talking with the venerated and mellifluous Rabindranath Tagore. We were speaking of the poetry of Baudelaire. Someone recited "La Mort des amants," that sonnet so appointed with beds, couches, flowers, chimneys, mantelpieces, mirrors, and angels. Tagore listened intently, but at the end he exclaimed, "I don't like your furniture poet!"

—Jorge Luis Borges, from a review of Tagore's Collected Poems and Plays

conjectures at random

Let us not conjecture at random about the greatest things.

—Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500BC)
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After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts would be soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, preface to Philosophical Investigations
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Matthew Arnold

Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.

–Matthew Arnold

mew images

We are all responsible to work for a better society, and there are two ways [to do this]: theoretically and practically. Poetry cannot work in practical ways, but it can give new images to the world and new relationships between words and things. This is its responsibility.

—Adonis (Syrian poet Ali Ahmed Said Esber)

http://www.praguepost.com/tempo/1547-prague-writers-festival-poet-paints-arab-world-laments-fall-of-poetry-in-west.html

vocabulary

Experts say that English speakers nowadays have a repertoire of words that amounts to 2,000 – 3,000 at best. Now, compare it with the number of words Shakespeare wielded. It is said the Bard mastered over 20,000 words.
(Quoted from wordnik.com)
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criticism

Criticism which began humbly and anomalously existing for the art, and was in part a mere by-product of philosophy and rhetoric, has now become, for a good many people, almost what the work of art exists for.

—Randall Jarrell, “Poetry & the Age"

mise en scène

Mise en scène is a French term and originates in the theater. It means, literally, "put in the scene." For film, it has a broader meaning, and refers to almost everything that goes into the composition of the shot, including the composition itself: framing, movement of the camera and characters, lighting, set design and general visual environment, even sound as it helps elaborate the composition. Mise-en-scène can be defined as the articulation of cinematic space, and it is precisely space that it is about.
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Mise en scène is a useful term when thinking about imagery in poetry and how the visualized environment is arrayed and apprehended via the resources of language. [JF]
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notebook

The fragments and discards left in my old notebook: the mind’s midden. [JF]

undertow of words

James Murray (editor of the first edition of the OED) said he faced “the terrible undertow of words.”

veneration

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

—Antonin Artaud

wonder

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

—Saint Thomas Aquinas

Pablo Neruda

It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me
—Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
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same age inside

We are always the same age inside.

—Gertrude Stein

age

It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me

—Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

aesthetic range

I'm not surprised that I have sympathies with such a broad range of poetry: I'm surprised that everybody doesn't.
—Thom Gunn
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archetypes

All art is memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in artists.

—Paul Klee

fragment, fragmentary

The fragment is doubtless a disappointing genre, but the only honest one.

—E.M. Cioran

art is...

Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.

—Guy Davenport

auditory imagination

What I call ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.

—T.S. Eliot, “Matthew Arnold,” The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism (Faber and Faber, 1933)

William Carlos Williams

A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words.
—William Carlos Williams

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nobly disheveled

Any bright young man can be taught to be artful. It is impossible to teach taste, but you can teach most anybody caution. It is always the lesser artists who are artful, they must learn their trade by rote. They must be careful never to make false steps, never to speak out of a carefully synthesized character. The greatest poetry is nobly disheveled. At least it never shows the scars of taking care.
—Kenneth Rexroth, introduction to Selected Poems of D.H. Lawrence

revision

Occam's Razor is a logical principle attributed to the mediaeval philosopher William of Occam (or Ockham). The principle states that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. This principle is often called the principle of parsimony. It underlies all scientific modeling and theory building. It admonishes us to choose from a set of otherwise equivalent models of a given phenomenon the simplest one. In any given model, Occam's razor helps us to "shave off" those concepts, variables or constructs that are not really needed to explain the phenomenon. By doing that, developing the model will become much easier, and there is less chance of introducing inconsistencies, ambiguities and redundancies.
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commonplace

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

—Jean Cocteau

poetry is, a poem is...

Poetry presupposes its purpose. [JF]
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The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by setting aside its requisitions.
—Henry David Thoreau
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Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form.
—Pierre-Jean Jouve (quoted in Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space)
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Poetry proves again and again that any single overall theory of anything doesn't work. Poetry is always the cat concert under the window of the room in which the official version of reality is being written."
—Charles Simic
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A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words.
—William Carlos Williams
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A verbal-textual construct that either calls attention to its content through the craft of its making and/or actually creates content by the craft of its making. [JF]
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