more fully in verse

Poetry. Perhaps I can express more fully in verse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinions—hard as rock—which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting.

—Thomas Hardy
[Notebook entry, 17 October 1896]

virtue of patience

LEVINE: I was unable to write any poetry about my working life while that was my working life. I tried a few times. And the poems were hysterical. I think they were just - you know, I couldn't control them. My anger was so overwhelming that I couldn't cope with it, just as I couldn't write about my boyhood very effectively until I was 40. It was still too powerful for me. But I'm patient, so I hung in there. And that's probably by chief virtue as a writer is my patience. So I waited, and I kept trying to write about factory work but I kept throwing the poems away. And the first poem I ever published about working in a factory, I was, I think, 31 or 2, but I don't like the poem anymore.

GROSS: Can you give me a sense of what was going wrong in the factory poems when you were still there? Is there anything...

LEVINE: Yes, I can. The language was overblown. You know, I wanted to use the word ‘eternity’ and - you know. I wanted to use a kind of Latin diction to - almost a Miltonic diction and a great chorus - build up a great chorus of sound and - to dramatize the horror show of some of the places I had worked. And I didn't have any - there was no tenderness in it for the people that I worked with. There was no - and that was a, you know - that was part of the reward that I got for those years was the people I was meeting, even though you didn't talk to them that much because places were often so loud. But you'd meet them afterwards or you'd make friends with them and spend time with them. And they weren't getting in the poems at all. The poems were, you know, my poor soul being hammered out of shape by General Motors. And they were a bit self-indulged.

—Philip Levine, in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air, 1991.

poetic ear

Poetry, from a technical point of view, may be defined as “the harmonic word”—with the greatest possible emphasis on the term “harmonic,” in the sense of a conjunction, cohesion, correlation, opposition of one idea to another, of one emotion to another. Once I spoke of a “poetic ear”; I meant the ear that can discern such things as these.

—George Seferis, On the Greek Style (Little Brown, 1966) translation by Rex Warner

untruthful town

The poem is always your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another. The reason for that, I believe, is that the stable set of knowns that the poem needs to anchor on is less stable at home than in the town you’ve just seen for the first time. At home, not only do you know that the movie house wasn’t always there, or that the grocer is a newcomer who took over after the former grocer committed suicide, you have complicated emotional responses that defy sorting out. With the strange town, you can assume all knowns are stable, and you owe the details nothing emotionally…Though you have never seen it before, it must be a town you’ve lived in all your life. You must take emotional possession of the town and so the town must be one that, for personal reasons I can’t understand, you feel is your town. In some mysterious way that you need not and probably won’t understand, the relationship is built on fragments of information that are fixed—and if you need knowns that the town does not provide, no trivial concerns such as loyalty to truth, a nagging consideration had you stayed home, stand in the way of your introducing them as needed by the poem. It is easy to turn the gas station attendant into a drunk, Back home it would have been difficult because he had a drinking problem.

—Richard Hugo, “The Triggering Town,” The Triggering Town (Norton, 1979)

objective correlative

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

—T.S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems"

emotionless sentence

a sentence is not emotional a paragraph is

—Gertrude Stein, How to Write

way through emotion

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling...A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually--that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too--but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, ch. 1

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