Walter Benjamin

Only in rare instances is lyric poetry in rapport with the experience of its readers.

Black Elk

I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and shapes of all shapes as they must lie together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

It is from understanding that power comes and the power in the ceremony was in understanding what it meant.

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The true work of the inventor consists in choosing among combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones, or rather, to avoid the trouble of making them, and the rules that must guide the choice are extremely fine and delicate. It's almost impossible to state them precisely; they must be felt rather than formulated.

David Bohm, On Creativity

What, then, is the creative state of mind, which so few have been able to be in? It is, first of all, one whose interest in what is being done is wholehearted and total, like that of a young child. With this spirit, it is always open to learning what is new, to perceiving new differences and similarities, leading to new orders and structures, rather than always tending to impose familiar orders and structures in the field of what is seen.

Tony Hoagland

The goal of the healthy artist is not to be crippled by the weight of literacy, nor intimidated into a kind of aesthetic conservatism, not to be engorged with fancy self-protective mannerisms, but be selectively informed and empowered by knowledge. This development of sensibility could be called the acquisition of taste.

Robinson Jeffers

Inhumanism: a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty. Only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life.

Hayden Carruth

You believe your writing can be a separate part of your life, but it can't. A writer's writing occurs in the midst of, and by means of, all the materials of life, not just a select few. And if your life is easy, your writing will be slack and purposeless. You need difficulty, you need necessity.

George Steiner

I must, even if only provisionally, consider the intimate complementarities between an authentic act of reading, an authentic motion of answerability to music and to art, and the rights to human privacy, to the wholly personal hospitality we owe our death—rights and an indebtedness now under pressure of narcotic devaluation in a culture of the secondary.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good.

The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.

Allen Grossman

The subject matter of poetry, whatever its means may be, however vast a net it throws over the world of objects, is always, in my view, the person. For poetry there is no sky which is different from the unknown inwardness of other selves, the knowledge of which will construct selves as persons. I see for poetry no possibility and, indeed, no need consistent with its nature or its purpose in the world to make any offering whatsoever toward a world which is not the person.

Letter to Li Tzu-jan

Old Jan! Have you written any poems recently? If we don't write poems, how can we make it through these boring days?

All in all, nothing in this world is that hard to do--just charge ahead and do it! A day will inevitably come when "the ditch will be dug and the waters flow through." I only fear that you will be overly cautious, that you may be unwilling to take the risk and plunge ahead. Well, force yourself a little! It would be a good idea not to prove yourself undeserving of a friend's encouragement.

Robert Frost

...it's not a progression, it's a circulation, a life-long circulation. No poem is intelligible except in the light of all the other poems, all the poems that were ever written, so you better get about them, circulating among them.

Walt Whitman, a rough, “A backward glance”

I say no land or people or circumstances ever existed so needing a race of singers and poems differing from all others, and rigidly their own, as the land and people and circumstances of our United States need such singers and poems today, and for the future. Still further, as long as the States continue to absorb and be dominated by the poetry of the Old World, and remain unsupplied with autochthonous song, to express, vitalize and give color to and define their material and political success, and minister to them distinctively, so long will they stop short of first-class Nationality and remain defective. . . .

Wendell Berry

"Poetry," Thoreau said, "is nothing but healthy speech..." By which he meant, I suppose, speech that is not only healthy in itself, but conducive to the health of the speaker, giving him a true and vigorous relation to the world.

Adrienne Rich

Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name.

Donald Revell

Alone with the Alone, poetry is nevertheless ringed round by a friendship and by the adventure of Friendship. A poem is a force for change produced by change, bearing witness to some new phase (or phrase) in the love relationship between a poet's soul and a poet's self. These friends are a solitude together, and the conversation of their silence leaves a trace, a phosphorescence if you will. The trace is a poem.

Ron Silliman, “Of theory, of Practice”

The writer cannot organize her desires for writing without some vision of the world toward which one hopes to work, and without having some concept of how literature might participate in such a future.

Wallace Stegner

Most artists are flawed; but they probably ought to make the effort not to be. But how do you teach people to enlarge themselves in order to enlarge their writing? You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of person you are. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, its teeth grow long and lock.

I guess you can suggest the ideal of it, the notion that it is a good thing to be large and magnanimous and wise, that it is a better aim in life than pleasure or money or fame. By comparison, it seems to me, pleasure and money, and probably fame as well, are contemptible goals. I would go so far as to say that to a class. But not all of the class would believe me.

Clayton Eshelman

The desire to write poetry lead first to seeing the vilifigura, the reviled face, the shame of your own face. To embrace your soul may be to experience the extent to which you despise your soul, the extent to which whatever this soul is feels despised--for what have you actively asked of it before?

R.P. Blackmur

The art of poetry is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse by the animating presence in the poetry of a fresh idiom: language so twisted and posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter in hand but adds to the stock of available reality.

Robert Frost

Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right and left. All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material--the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.

Charles Olson

Idealisms of any sort, like logic and like classification, intervene at just the moment they become more than the means they are, are allowed to become ways as end instead of ways to end, END, which is never more than this instant, than you on this instant, then you, figuring it out, and acting so. Find ways to stay in the human universe, and not to be led to partition reality at any point, in any way.

Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction

What is a true metaphor? It is...'footsteps of nature' whose noise we hear alike in primitive language and in the finest metaphors of poets. Men do not invent those mysterious relations between separate external objects, and between objects and feelings or ideas, which it is the function of poetry to reveal.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

A genuine poem...allows us toe experience nearness in such a way that this nearness is held in and through the linguistic form of the poem. Whenever we have to hold something, it is because it is transient and threatens to escape our grasp. In fact, our fundamental experience as being subject to time is that all things escape us.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

This being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows on to dream in peace.