Conjectures At Random

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild goose chase, and is never ...

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so. —Sydney Smith (1771-1845), essayist and clergyman, quoted by Hesketh Pears...

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in th...

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home. […] My apologies to great questions for small answers. Couple of lines from the poem...

“Quem não vê bem uma palavra, não pode ver bem uma alma." "One who cannot see a word well, cannot see a soul well." — Ferna...

The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all t...

To create a work of art that the critic cannot even talk about ought to be the artist’s chief concern. —John Ashbery, Art News , May 1972

How threadbare the language of happiness! —Osip Mandelstam, from poem “Tristia,” Osip Mandelstam: The Eyesight of Wasps (Ohio State U. Pr...

My voice excites me, my pen never. —Margaret Fuller quoted in this review of Bright Circle Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcenden...

Miss Stein is bringing back life to our language by what appears, at first, to be an anarchic process. First she breaks down the predestined...

Poems are lumps—physical entities. This does not mean, of course, that they are not about something—the complete dependence of all the paths...

I hit upon Edwin Arlington Robinson’s beautiful and powerful poem “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man From Stratford,” a philosophical and critical...

My way of knowing experience is to formulate a metaphor which describes or encapsulates a particular moment; it is a way of getting at the t...

To speak of Poetry is to speak of the most subtle, the most delicate, and most accurate instrument by which to measure Life. H.T. Tobias A....

And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skele...

Then teacher would draw lines that tied various parts of her sentence together, “at the door” descending like a staircase from its noun. Thi...

Every poem has the right to ask for a new poetics. —Anna Swir, Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon Press, 1996), translated by Czeslaw Milos...

If you can get to its essence, even a lowly potato would be poetic. —Jayanta Mahapatra, “Of the Lowly Potato: Indian English Poetry Today” ...

I wanted to signal that My Life was an incomplete work, a Bildungs-poem (or Bildungsgedicht) that cannot fully (or successfully) account fo...

…the conquest of the public imagination by the arts, by “art as a way of life,” has reinforced the natural resistance of the mind to ordinar...

[Great humour] is no longer dependent upon the mere trick and quibble of words, or the odd and meaningless incongruities in things that stri...

When I state myself as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person. —Emily Dickinson, letter to Thomas Wentw...

[Frank O'Hara] also mentioned a lot of things just because he liked them—for example jujubes. Some of these things had not appeared befo...

It never occurred to me that I wasn’t going to write poetry until I read Wallace Stevens. When I was very young, reading Shakespeare and Bla...

Still others owe their beauty to human violence: the push toppling them from their pedestals or the iconoclast’s hammer has made them what t...

Poet and critic Paul Valéry once remarked that he could never write a novel because he would have to write sentences like, ‘The Marquis left...

What this exercise [spend a full 3 hours in front of a painting, recording your observations] shows students is that just because you have l...

My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail...

Yeats saw the things of this world differently; he was an essentialist. In the men and the women he knew—both those he loved and those he ha...

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the...

it is easier now to follow the inner flow beneath these scraps of language, to appreciate the simple clarity of the sentences he has constru...

A poem is an event, not a record of an event. —Robert Lowell Quoted in Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs (U. of Michigan Press, 1988)...

What produces all philosophical treatises and poems and scriptures is the struggle of Life to become divinely conscious of itself instead of...

The relationship between an artist and reality is always an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. I...

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation...

There was a savior who rescued me from the Romantic complexities and showed me that I could love poetry in English: Carl Sandburg, my first ...

The study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of...

Allen Tate said, describing his own critical essays, “I simply conducted my education in public.” Quoted in “The Exercise of Reverence,” Es...

He kept as it were a harem of words, to which he was constant and absolutely faithful. Some he favoured more than others, but he neglected n...

In a poem, each word has to be right and contribute to the whole; in a story only every sentence. In a novel only every page. — Alison Laur...

Poetry. Perhaps I can express more fully in verse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinions—hard as rock—which...

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkabl...

Slowly from nice neat letters; doing things well is more important than doing them. -- Wake up singers! Time for the echoes to end and...

[Commenting on a stanza from Shelley’s poem “Laon and Cyntha"] The rhythm is varied and troubled, and the lines, which are in Spenser ...

“As you will," said the barber; "but what are we to do with these little books that are left?" "These must be, not chiv...

Source of Lawrence's oft-quoted remark: ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale’ or ‘Trust the tale, not the teller’ … The artist usual...

Parker Kaufman speaking about his father, Beat poet Bob Kaufman: "It's frustrating when everyone's telling you, 'How dare...

I am working and trying to deserve the privilege of speaking, writing, and knowing perfectly well that the only words which really deserve t...

There is no doubt of the fact that “Cavafy stands at the boundary where poetry strips herself in order” (as I have said elsewhere) “to becom...

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...