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 none. He used them more often out of compliment than of necessity.
—Edward Thomas, speaking of Swinburne, Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Critical Study (Mitchell Kennerley, 1912)
Showing posts with label necessity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label necessity. Show all posts
not luxury
I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
—Audre Lorde, “Mapping,” Lofty Dogmas (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
—Audre Lorde, “Mapping,” Lofty Dogmas (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin
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