Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. 782
Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry. 615
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become. 638
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony. 645
The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth. 2.05K
I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That’s how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey. 634
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge. 682
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. 730
I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it. 630
With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books. 567
Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are. 678
If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry. 569
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man’s life if he has the weight and cares about the words. 700
It’s necessary to start most work alone. But I’m tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it’s borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate. 651
A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare – let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel. 2.49K
