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Poetry Quotes by Lascelles Abercrombie
- Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
- But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of…
- The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because…
- Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things;…
- Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
- If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
- That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar,…
- With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he…
- By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society…
More Poetry Quotes
- Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. — Aristotle
- Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals,… — Aristotle
- I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come… — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets.… — Paul Auster
- If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. — M H Abrams
- Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. — Matthew Arnold
- I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. — John Ashbery
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases… — Margaret Atwood
- The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden