Many good poems have a kind of window-moment in them—they change their direction of gaze in a way that suddenly opens a broadened landscape of meaning and feeling. Encountering such a moment, the reader breathes in some new infusion, as steeply perceptible as any physical window's increase of light, scent, sound, or air. The gesture is one of lifting, unlatching, releasing; mind and attention swing open to new-peeled vistas.
—Jane Hirshfield, "Close Reading: Windows," Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.)
Showing posts with label moment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label moment. Show all posts
best things ever said
Of the other poets, Baratýnsky
wrote very little prose, but this little contains a quite disproportionate
amount of the best things ever said in Russian on the subject of poetry. Two of
his utterances should be especially remembered: his definition of lyrical
poetry as "the fullest awareness of a given moment," and his remark
that good poetry is rare because two qualities, as a rule mutually exclusive,
are necessary to the making of a poet—"the fire of creative imagination
and the coldness of controlling reason."
—D.S. Mirsky, "The Poets' Prose," A History of Russian
Literature: From the Beginnings to 1900
(Vantage Books, 1958), edited by Francis J. Whitfield
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