About a secret of poetry: It has been said that poetry is an art of words. But poetry is an art of words only to the extent to which it is also an art of non-words; indeed, silence ought to be omnipresent in poetry, very much as death is forever present in life.
—Lucian Blaga, from The Élan of the Island, 1946. (Translated by ANDREI BANTAÛ.)
pawn e4
If poetry reaches the point which chess has reached, where the decisive, profound, and elegant combinations lie within the scope only of masters, and are appreciable only to competent and trained players, that will seem to many people a sorry state of affairs, and to some people a consequence simply of the sinfulness of poets; but it will not in the least mean that poetry is, as they say, dead; rather the reverse. It is when poetry becomes altogether too easy, too accessible, runs down to a few derivative formulae and caters to low tastes and lazy minds—it is then that the life of the art is in danger.
—Howard Nemerov, "The Difficulty of Difficult Poetry,” Reflections on Poetry and Poetics (Rutgers University Press, 1972)
—Howard Nemerov, "The Difficulty of Difficult Poetry,” Reflections on Poetry and Poetics (Rutgers University Press, 1972)
to get it right
Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
—Wallace Stevens, “Adagia,” Opus Posthumous (Vintage, 1990, p. 201)
—Wallace Stevens, “Adagia,” Opus Posthumous (Vintage, 1990, p. 201)
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