portion of its lost heart

Though she may never compose an epic or a tragic drama in five acts, the woman poet has a singular role and precarious destiny. And, at the moment, in a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.

―Louise Bogan "The Heart and the Lyre," essay (1947).

solo voice

All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy.

John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties,” The Crayon, vol. 7, no. 4, 1860.

noisy insect

A quotation is not an excerpt. A quotation is a cicada. It is part of its nature never to quiet down.

—Osip Madelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” Selected Poems (New York Review of Books, 2004), translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin.

good soup

Je vis de bonne soupe, et non de beau langage.

Molière's Les Femmes Savantes (The Learned Ladies)

[I live on good soup, and not beautiful language.]

she says

Say it.     Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.

—Muriel Rukeyser, from “The Speed of Darkness, Out of Silence: Selected Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 1992)

wild flower

When we talk of wild poetry, we sometimes forget the parallel of wild flowers. They exist to show that a thing may be more modest and delicate for being wild.

—G. K. Chesterton, Chaucer (1932), Collected Works Vol. XVIII

dark passage

[Poetry’s] alleged obscurity is due not to its own nature, which is to enlighten, but to the darkness which it explores, and must explore: the dark of the soul herself and the dark of the mystery which envelops human existence.

—St-John Perse, essay entitled "On Poetry," translation by W.H. Auden, St. John Perse: Collected Poems (Princeton U. Press, 1971)

tear in half

Almost the only thing I still like nowadays is this process of scraping away. No more stylistic gewgaws. Tear yourself in half or else take the finished poem and tear that in half.

(April 15, 1937, Letters to Marcel Béalu)

—Max Jacob, Hesitant Fire, Selected Prose of Max Jacob (U. of Nebraska Press, 1991), translated and edited by Moishe Black and Maria Green.