Some Literary Criticism quotes

Purposes and Definitions of the Arts

• Purposes
  • Poetry and other Arts
    • "Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank", Kant, "Critique of Judgement", p.215
    • "Hegel declares that poetry is supreme among the arts, combining music's apprehension of the inner life of the mind with the determinate phenomenal character of sculpture and painting. In contrast to many of his contemporaries who make similar claims, however, Hegel never wavers in insisting that poetry is the crisis of art as much as it is its triumph. Poetry's uniqueness stems from the fact that the subject and the object of poetry, the medium and the message, are one and the same. Unlike painting or sculpture, poetry can deal with any and every topic in any and every fashion because in the final analysis what poetry really expresses is the mind's apprehension of itself to itself in itself", "Derrida, Hegel, and the Language of Finitude", Jan Mieszkowski, Postmodern Culture, May 2005
  • Poetry and Ritual
    • "I suggest that what artists do in all media can be summarized as deliberately performing the operations that occur instinctively during a ritualized behaviour: they simplify or formalize, repeat (sometimes with variation), exaggerate, and elaborate in both space and time for the purpose of attracting attention and provoking and manipulating emotional response", Dissanayake, "Aesthetic Incunabula", Philosophy and Literature - Volume 25, Number 2, October 2001.
    • "all art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment", T.S. Eliot, The Dial 75
  • Poetry and Life
    • "poetry gets to be the poetry of life by successfully becoming first the poetry of poetry", Hollander, "Melodious Guile", Yale Univ Press, 1988, p.15
    • "Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves" George Oppen, "An Adequate Vision: A George Oppen Daybook", ed Davidson, IR 26:5-31, p.29.
    • "Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry", A.E. Housman, "The Name and Nature of Poetry" (lecture), 1933.
    • "The public, as a whole, does not demand or appreciate the pure expression of beauty. Its cultured members expect to find in poetry, if anything, repose from material and nervous anxiety; an apt or chiselled phrase strokes the appetites and tickles the imagination. The more general public merely enjoys its platitudes and truisms jerked on to the understanding in line and rhyme; truth put into metre sounds overwhelmingly true", Harold Monro, "The Future of Poetry", Poetry Review, January 1912
  • "What the artist tries to do (either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object", Ramachandran, 1999
  • "It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has been foisted upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with separate 'particulars,' for such rows do not exist.", Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, p.27
  • "The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent", Jacobson
  • "The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing", Samuel Johnson, "Johnson on Shakespeare" (ed. Walter Raleigh), 1908. p.16
  • "All Poetry, to speak with Aristotle and the Greek critics (if for so plain a point authorities be thought wanting) is, properly, imitation. It is, indeed, the noblest and most extensive of the mimetic arts; having all creation for its object, and ranging the entire circuit of universal being", Richard Hurd, "Discourse on Poetical Imitation", 1751
  • "Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter", "Slip-shod Sibyls", Germaine Greer, Viking, 1995, p.3
  • "I want poetry not to be like reality but to be as impossible as reality" - Keston Sutherland
  • "The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force", Cocteau, p.12, "La Mort et les Statues", Paris, 1977.
  • "The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us", Matthew Arnold, "The Study of Poetry".
  • "If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear", Valéry, "Reflections", p.64, Collected Works 13:142.
  • "The non-mimetic character of language is thus, in a certain way, the opportunity and the condition for poetry to exist. Poetry exists only to 'renumerate' in other words, to repair and compensate for the 'defect of languages'" - Gerard Genette, "Valéry and the Poetics of Language"
  • "The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important" - Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", 1917 (in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lemon and Reis, Univ of Nebraska Press, 1965), p.12
  • "Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words" - Wei T'ai, 11th century.
  • "No longer do we accept the 'sublimation model' according to which 'the function of art is to sublimate or transform experience, raising it from ordinary to extraordinary, from commonplace to unique, from low to high'", Rosalind Krauss, October 56, [spring 1991]:3)
  • "A poem points to nothing but itself. Information is relative. A poem is absolute", EM Forster, "Anonymity: An Inquiry", 1925.
  • "Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation" - Brodsky, "On Grief and Reason", Hamish Hamilton, 1996)
  • "The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive", Auden, in "The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939", ed Mendelson, Faber, p.371
  • "The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE", BLAST
  • "The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead" - C. Day Lewis
  • "Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit", Valéry
  • "If the value of poetry is seen as dependent on posterity, and thus in opposition to strategies of intervention in the present, particularly to interventions with any serious prospect of political effectivity, then contemporaneity is mortgaged to aesthetic ambition", Drew Milne, "Agoraphobia, and the embarrassment of manifestos" (Parataxis, republished in Jacket 20, 2002).
  • "Verbal art is experienced as aesthetic because it exploits to the full every option for making verbal behaviour difficult", Nigel Fabb, "Language and Linguistic Structure", CUP, 2002, p.217
  • "most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter", Wallace Stevens, "Two or Three Ideas" in "Opus Posthumous", Samuel French Morse, Knopf, 1975.
  • "Poetry is always the most impure and most conservative of the arts", Monroe K. Spears, "Dionysus and the City", OUP, 1970, p.111
• Definitions
  • "Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. More than meter, more than rhyme, more than images or alliteration or figurative language, line is what distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some other kind of writing", James Longenbach", The Art of the Poetic Line", Graywolf, 2009
  • "[poetry is news] brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo", Milosz
  • "Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard ... All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy", JS Mill, "What is Poetry", 1833
  • "What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them", Paz, "L'Arc et la lyre", 1965, p.46
  • "Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance", Wallace Stevens, "The Necessary Angel", 1951, p.116
  • "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins", Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800
  • "[Poetry is ] An integral/Lower limit speech/Upper limit music", "A" 12, Zukovsky, p.138
  • "poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible", Genet, "Our Lady of the Flowers", 1963, p.293
  • "the poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such", Ron Silliman,"The New Sentence", Roof, 1987
  • "poetry is a verdict rather than an intention", Leonard Cohen
  • "Art's effect is due to the tension resulting from the clash of the collocation of elements of two (or more) systems [of interpretation]. This conflict has the function of breaking down automatism of perception and occurs simultaneously on the many levels of a work of art ... All levels may carry meaning", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.xv
  • "Poetic language features an iconic rather than a predominantly conventional relationship of form and content in which all language (and cultural) elements, variant as well as invariant, may be involved in the expression of the content.", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.xxi
  • "certain supplementary restrictions imposed on the text compel us to perceive it as poetry. As soon as one assigns a given text to the category of poetry, the number of meaningful elements in it acquires the capacity to grow [and] the system of their combinations also becomes more complex", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.33
  • "in several ways, one of which is entirely specific to it, poetry contains repetitions in the signifier which thus work to foreground the signifier. This feature can stand as a definition of poetry", Antony Easthope, "Poetry as Discourse", Methuen, 1963, p.16.
  • "The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow convey a sense of life set in a framework of order ... all great art ... harmonises consciousness with the ego-transcending Self", "The Seven Basic Plots", Christopher Booker, continuum, 2004, p.552
  • "[Poetry is] that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them." - Banville
  • "In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs", Frye, "Anatomy of Criticism", p.74
  • "[Literature is a form of language that] breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence", Foucault, "The Order of Things", p.300
  • "Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer", John Constable, PN Review 159, V31.1 (2004), p.40
  • "A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.", William Carlos Williams, "Selected Essays"
  • "The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself ... Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act" - "101 Sonnets", Don Paterson, Faber and Faber, 1999, p.xiv.
  • "a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning", Valéry
  • "As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry" - "Short and Sweet", Simon Armitage, Faber and Faber, 1999, p.xiii.
  • "A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years", Ginsberg
  • "verse is the vehicle of exploration rather than the versification of a pre-conceived idea", Peter Armstrong, Other Poetry II.22
  • "[a poem is] a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words", Valéry, "Complainte d'une convalescence en mai"
  • "[a poet's work] consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms", Valéry
  • "True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful", Goethe.
  • "Art is the placing of your attention on the periphery of knowing", Robert Irwin, Arts Magazine, Feb 1976.
  • "The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.", Valéry, Tel Quel
  • "it is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is" - I.A. Richards
  • "a poem shouldn't mean but be", Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica"
  • "to write a poem is to find a way from exile into pilgrimage" - Gunn?
  • "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things", T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", 1919.
  • "[the poet's mind is] a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feeling, phrases and images, which remain there until all the particles, which can unite to form a new compound are present together", T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", 1919.
  • "the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes" - T.S. Eliot.
  • "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting" - Robert Frost
  • "Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event" - Lowell
  • "poetic effect [is] the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures.", - D.Sperber and D.Wilson, "Relevance", Blackwell, 1986, p.222)
  • "[the poetic function is] the set (Einstellung) towards the message itself, focus on the message for its own sake [which] by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects", Jakobsen, in "Style in Language", (ed T.A. Sebeck), Cambridge, 1960, p.356
  • "the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry", William Empson, "Seven Types of Ambiguity", Penguin, 1961, p.21
  • the "meaning of poetry is its 'tension', the full organised body of all the extension and intension that we can find in it", Tate, quoted in "Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry", O'Connor, Univ of Chicago Press, 1948, p.143
  • "What is common to all modern poetry is the assertion or the assumption (most often the latter) that syntax in poetry is wholly different from syntax as understood by logicians and grammarians", Donald Davie, "Articulate Energy", 1955
  • "Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.", Octavia Paz
  • "Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.", Marianne Moore, "Poetry",
• Reception
  • "[for Fish], poetry is generically characterized not by any formal quality distinguishing it from prose, but by the activity of the reader, who gives one kind of attention to prose and another kind to poetry. Nor does the supposed rich excess of meaning provide a useful means of defining poetic language, since the reader can readily supply that excess in the act of reading", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.115
  • "We might think of poetry as the most compelling, forceful use of language, but we must also consider whether that is because we give that force and that richness to the language. That is, poetry may be demanding to read because we think of a poem as a powerful, concentrated use of all the resources of language", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.117
  • • "The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive", p.19
    • "a work of (whatever) art can be either 'received' or 'used'. ...'Using' is inferior to 'reception' because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it ... When the art in question is literature a complication arises, for to 'receive' significant words is always, in one sense, to 'use' them, to go through and beyond them to an imagined something which is not itself verbal", p.88
    from "An Experiment in Criticism", CS Lewis, CUP, 1961
  • "I do share Jacobson's sense that the characteristic response associated with the reading of poetry, at least in postmedieval Western culture, is a feeling of intensified referentiality combined with (and inseparable from) a heightened awareness of the aural qualities of language", Derek Attridge, "Peculiar Language", Methuen, 1988, p.135
  • "I regard literary reception as generally characterised by subjectivity, fictionality, polyvalence and form orientation", "Understanding Metaphor in Literature", G.Steen, Longman, 1994.

Form (back to top)

• "In a truly beautiful work of art the content should do nothing, the form everything", Schiller, "On the Aesthetic Education of Man", 1795, xxii.106
• "Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini", Paul Muldoon, "Irish Times", 2003
• "Poetic formalism is a bit like keeping a bale of hay in your garage to remind you of the horse-power that preceded automobiles", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.130
• "Only new contents permit new forms. Indeed they demand them. For if new contents were forced into old forms, at once you would have a recurrence of that disastrous division between content and form", Brecht, "Uber Lyrik", 1938, p.16
• "Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making limitations for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it", Doris Lessing, "the golden notebook" (Preface), Flamingo, 1972, p.10
• "the primary reason for reading is pleasure, and, dry as it sounds to say so, the primary source of poetic pleasure is form. The content of a poem may be personal to the point of narcissism, self-involved to the point of autism, but its form - that is, any feature that gives the poem cohesion and keeps it from drifting into chaos - is communal, inclusive, even cordial.", Billy Collins, 2006
• "The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush ... and shed the perfume of impalpable form", Whitman
• "I would contend that the constraints of form are spurs to the imagination: that they are in fact the chief producers of imagination", George Szirtes, Poetry, Feb 2006
• "Formal writing is, in fact, a beautiful device for liberating the essential powerlessness of the artist, Keats's negative capability. Outsiders may see formal composition as rule-fixated grind: practitioners know it as rule-forgetting delight ... I have heard it said that the least talented writers benefit the most from practising form. This is only partly true ... In general ... form urges all degrees of ability to optimum performance", Carol Rumens, "The Creative Writing Coursebook", Julia Bell & Paul Magrs (eds), MacMillan, 2001, p.226
• • "Ingarden's treatment of the structures of objects of art is indebted ... to both Aristotle's primary stress, in the Poetics, on the stratified structure of the work of art itself, and to Lessing's attempt, in the Laocoon, to set psychologistic questions aside in the interests of general problems of structure.", p.8
  • "The formal unity of the work derives from the essential inner-connectedness (sic) of these four strata.", p.11
  From "Selected Papers in Aesthetics/Roman Ingarden", P.J. McCormick, The Catholic University of America Press, 1985.
• "I think there is a 'fluid' as well as a 'solid' content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms", Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect" in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound
• "vers libre has not even the excuse of a polemic; it is a battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art", T.S. Eliot,"Reflections on Vers Libre"
• "I began to suspect that the vaunted strictures of the New Formalism were rather like the rules in a household with small children: tiny attempts at maintaining order, frequently reiterated, and rarely observed.", Eliot Weinberger, "What Was Formalism?", Jacket 6
• "Regular rhythm and rhyme schemes work for me as a kind of drilling rig to mine for meanings that lie beneath the original idea of the poem", A. Adams, "Rialto 38", 1997, p.45
• "metre with its tendency towards statement rather than exploration ... It has long been recognised that metrical verse encourages a tendency towards reflection and introspection while free verse acts as a vehicle for expressing the immediate, capturing the sense of the moment as it happens", Ian Parks, p.14, Acumen 51, 2005
• "metre always fixes at least two characteristics of the line. The metre always fixes the length of the line (with controlled variation) ... In English, stress maxima are fixed in place. In Welsh, rhyme is fixed in place. In Irish, word boundaries are fixed in place", Nigel Fabb, "Language and Linguistic Structure", CUP, 2002, p.142
• "formal complexity has a function irrespective of whether it is mirrored in the concept of the poem; I suggest that we experience these shifting formal contradictions and complexities at aesthetic", Nigel Fabb, "Language and Linguistic Structure", CUP, 2002, p.185
• "While there is a general tendency [Greek dactylic hexameter, Vedic Sanskrit, etc] for the end of the line to be metrically strict, there is also a general tendency for the very final syllable to show some metrical looseness", Nigel Fabb, "Language and Linguistic Structure", CUP, 2002, p.175
• "form is never more than an extension of content, and content never more than an extension of form opposition", Creeley or Olson
• "History and politics can play a part: they propose questions. In poetry the answers come not as arguments but as form" - Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets", 1998, p.1
• "[Words] already have what the artist first wants to give them - meaning - and fatally lack what he needs in order to shape them - body. I propose that the nature and primary function of the most important poetic devices - especially rhyme, meter, and metaphor - is to release words in some measure from their bondage to meaning, their purely referential role, and to give or restore to them the corporeality which a true medium needs.", Burckhardt, "The Poet as Fool and Priest", ELH 23 (1956), p.279
• "When the correct device is also the expected one and by definition outworn, the act of composition will bristle with difficulties, with unforgivable wrong choices. The device itself will be parodied, distorted, or avoided in such a way as to make its absence very remarkable", "The Chances of Rhyme", R.Wesling, Univ of California Press, 1980.
• "a new form will always seem more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to the consecrated forms", Robbe-Grillet, "For a New Novel", Grove-Evergreen, 1965, p.17.
• "In all beautiful art the essential thing is the form", Kant, "Critique of Judgement", p.214
• "[free verse is the] direct utterance from the instant, whole man ... [, the ] soul and mind and body surging at once, nothing left out", D H Lawrence, "New Poems", 1918.
• "The difficult thing about learning to write free verse is that you have to improvise what you consider to be interesting enough rhythms to exist on their own, and they have to be different for each line. So I think it's easier to write well in metrical poetry, when you can", Thom Gunn, quoted by Potts in The Guardian.
• "I think I read my poetry more by length than by stress - as a matter of movements in space than footsteps hitting the earth. I think more of a bird with broad wings flying and lapsing through the air, than anything, when I think of metre ... It all depends on the pause - the natural pause, the natural lingering of the voice according to the feeling - it is the hidden emotional pattern that makes poetry, not the obvious form", D H Lawrence, letter to Edward Marsh
• "Forms are unlike those sent by the IR, they are not to be filled in" - Alan Rawsthorne
• "Form is not regarded as a neat mould to be filled, but rather as a sieve to catch certain kinds of material" - Theodore Roethke
• "form isn't a container (of content) but rather a rule for generating a possible 'next move'", Foreman, "How to write a play", p.229
• "It has been suggested that free verse is inferior to metrical verse because it provides nothing against which to make variations. [Louis] Simpson's ear is so good that some of his poems suggest ... that free verse can be rewardingly varied by the occasional use of meter" - "Compulsory Figures", Henry Taylor, Louisiana State Univ Press, 1992, p.46
• • "Meter is perceived in the actual stress-contour, or the line is perceived as unmetrical, or the perceiver doesn't perceive meter at all", p.262
  • "It follows ... that the notion of norm and variation is not relevant to traditional meter", p.268
  from "Collected Essays", JV Cunningham
• "The governing principle of much Persian poetry is circular rather than linear; rather than a logically sequential progression, a poem is seen as a collection of stanzas interlinked by symbol and image - the links being patterns of likeness and unlikeness, of repetition and variation - which 'hover', as it were, around an unspoken centre", Glyn Pursglove, Acumen 25, p.9
• "As stress-languages, English and German allow for great flexibility in the formation of lines; the French alexandrine however is based on syllable count, and so effective versification becomes a matter of observing certain norms: the caesura dividing the two hemistichs, the avoidance of hiatus, the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, and so on", Marjorie Perloff, "Lucent and inescapable rhythms: metrical 'choice' and historical formation"
• • "Aristotelian logic, the reigning mode until the time of Coleridge and Hegel, analyzes the forms of coherence found in completed acts of thought. What Coleridge proposed as a dynamic supplement, in his idea of method as 'progressive translation', is a logic of the activity of thinking ... the miming of the writer's choices at transition points and of the reader's shifting attention.", p.113
  • "The principal of expressive variation from a metrical norm, according to Paul Fussell in Poetry Meter and Poetic Form, 'is certainly the primary source of metrical pleasure for the modern critical reader' ... Such patterns - of expectation, delay, and resolution - exercise the grasp of grammar and the delicacy of anyone's ear.", p.151
  from Wesling, D, "The New Poetries", Associated University Presses, 1985.
• "The further in anything, as a work of art, the organisation is carried out, the deeper the form penetrates ... the more capacity for receiving that synthesis of ... impressions which gives us the unity with the prepossession conveyed by it", Hopkins, "Notebooks", p.96
• "In poetry deviations from the vraisemblable are easily recuperated as metaphors which should be translated or as moments of a visionary or prophetic stance; but in the novel conventional expectations make such deviations more troubling and therefore potentially more powerful", J. Culler, "Structuralist Poetics", Cornell UP, 1975, p.198.
• "on the simplest level, form functions for any poet as a kind of scaffold from which the poem can be constructed. Stravinsky maintained that only in art could one be freed by the imposition of more rules, perhaps because these rules limit the field of possibilities and escort us rapidly beyond the selection of tools and media to laying the first stone of the work itself. For the reader, on the other hand, the shared language of the poem functions as a map through the terrain of a new idea ... The effect of form on the reader is like the hypnotist's dangling fob watch ... We are hypnotised or spellbound by form, because the traditional aural techniques of verse ... are designed to fix the poem in the memory ... But think of the unconscious effect of form on the poets themselves ... Any degree of difficulty in a form requires of the poet that s/he negotiate with the medium, and compromise what s/he originally 'spontaneously' intended to say ... surely this is precisely the function of 'form in the traditional sense' - that serendipity provided by negotiation with a resistant medium." - Michael Donaghy, "binary myths" (Andy Brown ed.), p.16.
• the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
  the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE
  Olson, Poetry New York No 3, 1950.
• "In the classical system, the length or shortness of syllables is fundamental, but there was also a beat accent, and the two never corresponded exactly. In the European system the beat is fundamental, but still the two never correspond. This sets up a descant. The natural rhythm of the spoken language, that is the rhythm of syntax, of meaning, also never or nearly never coincides with the metrical units even for a single line. When is does so, it produces the gigantic clang of a final closure ... But sometimes the ground-rhythm is very obscurely established; in that case the moment it becomes clear is an important and tense one", "The Noise Made by Poems", Peter Levi, Anvil, 1977, p.77.
• "free verse is inherently more private in character [than metrical poetry]", Jonathan Holden, Style and Authenticity in Postmodern Poetry, Univ of Columbia Press, 1986, p.73
• "I will do what I will do, the free verse poet says to his audience, and it is not yours to wonder why. He versifies by fiat", Timothy Steele, Missing Measures, Univ of Arkansas Press, 1990, p.283
• "the distinction of metre is regular and uniform, and not, like that which is produced by what is usually called POETIC DICTION, arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices upon which no calculation whatever can be made. In the one case, the Reader is utterly at the mercy of the Poet, respecting what imagery or diction he may choose to connect with the passion; whereas, in the other, the metre obeys certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader both willingly submit because they are certain, and because no interference is made by them with the passion, but such as the concurring testimony of ages has shown to heighten and improve the pleasure which co-exists with it.", Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800
• "the free verse, now dominant not only in the US but around the world, has become, with notable exceptions, little more than linear prose, arbitrarily divided into line-lengths", Marjorie Perloff, "The Oulipo Factor", Jacket 23
• "The poetic line seems highly problematic nowadays and it sometimes seems better to avoid it altogether", Frances Presley, "Poetry Review", V98.4, 2008
• "Not only hapless adolescents, but many gifted and justly esteemed poets writing in contemporary nonmetrical forms, have only the vaguest concept, and the most haphazard use, of the line", Denise Levertov", On the Function of the Line", 1979
• "The term structure which we have used so often, is a metaphor from architecture, and may be misleading when we are speaking of narrative, which is not a simultaneous structure but a movement in time.", "The Great Code", Northrop Frye.
• "Constraints are interesting interfaces between processes and products", Cris Cheek
• "Sequence and contiguity are inescapable features of sentence-processing, of meaning creation" .. "duple patterns ... are optimally contrastive, and lend themselves most readily to both local and larger-scale contrasts" - "Against Transcendental Gossip: The Symbolic Language of Rhythm" (in PN Review 123), Chris McCully, p.44.
• "The poetic spirit requires to be limited, that it may move within its range with a becoming liberty ... it must act according to laws derivable from its own essence", Schlegel, quoted by Coleridge.
• "vers libre has become as prolix and as verbose as any of the flaccid varieties that preceded it", Pound, "A Retrospect", 1918.
• • p.93 - "1) coupling need not occur solely between two lines (as in the cases with rhyme) but may arise within equivalent syntactic positions in one line; 2) coupling which primarily foregrounds one element (a phonic one, for instance) tends, secondarily, to foreground other elements (semantic ones); 3) coupling on the semantic level involves opposed as well as parallel features ...; 4) coupling is not solely a microcontextual trait."
  • p.97 - "Modernist verse perforce employs couplings in many ways different from couplings which arise in traditional verse. Two differences between a Modernist coupling and a traditional coupling involve the assumption of nondeleted syntax and accurate 'positioning' through meter"
  • p.98 - types of cohesion: phonic, grammatical, rhetorical and semantic.
  • p.110 - "[free verse] is based not on the recurrence of stress accent in a regular, strictly measurable pattern" and it "treats the device of rhyme with a similar freedom and irregularity", "The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics", Preminger and Brogan, Princeton University Press, 1993
  from "Modernist Form", J. S. Childs, Associated University Presses, 1986.
• "The only reality in literature is form; meaning is a shadow-show", Valéry
• "Form in literature is an arousing and fulfilment of desires. A work has form insofar as one part of it leads us to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence", Kenneth Burke, "Counter-statement", 1931
• "Forms can only expose other forms, and the new ones seem transparent only by highlighting the opaqueness of the old", ra page, "hyphen", Comma Press, 2003, p.x
• "The poet who writes 'free' verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor." - Auden, "Writing" (from "The Dyer's Hand")
• Books - "Vision and Resonance", John Hollander. "Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse", R.D. Curton, Longman, 1992. "Lines and 'Lines'", Sinclair, J.McH, 1972, in B.B. Kachru and H.F.W. Stahlke (eds) Current Trends in Stylistics, Edmonton, Alberta: Linguistic Research Inc. "Cohesion in English", Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R., 1976, London:Longman. "The Web of Words", Carter, R. and Long, M., 1987, London: Longman. "Linguistic Structures in Poetry", SR Levin.

Poetry/Prose (back to top)

• "Prose is much more heraclitean [than poetry], it begins with change and seeks only to find ways of managing it", Godzich and Kittay, "Emergence of Prose", U of Minnesota P, p.197
• "in prose you start with the world/ and find the words to match; in poetry you start/ with the words and find the world in them.", Charles Bernstein, "Dysraphism", 1983
• "Perhaps one of the more interesting developments in poetry over the last fifty years has been its overlap with short story writing. It's unsurprising that poetic language has relaxed into an easy colloquial manner but maybe what wasn't expected is the way poetry's taken on the subject matter of prose forms", ???, "Seam 27", 2007, p.53,
• "There are two chief classical sources of the long line - the epic hexameter and the dithyrambic lyric: the first stands for heroic endeavor. the second for ecstatic utterance ... Hopkins used the long line in several ways - as a container of heterogeneity [or] to creep up on something by a chromatic series of words ... Whitman ... also used it to signify intellectual and speculative difficulties", Helen Vendler, "The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham", Harvard Univ Press, 1995, p.72
• "isometric breathing is the basis for regular lines, orderly and successive ones. But the gaze has no such isometric rhythm: a gaze can be prolonged at will, held for inspection, meditated on, and periodically interrupted ... what utterance becomes is the tracking of the gaze.", Helen Vendler, "The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham", Harvard Univ Press, 1995, p.83
• "In contemporary European literature, 'poetry' hardly consists exclusively of work with line breaks; 'short prose' no longer necessarily implies 'fiction' or 'short story'", John Taylor, "The Antioch Review", Summer 2007, p.574
• "Everyone grasps that hospitals operate as factories of feeling - humming production lines of dread and despair, of hope and renewal. Poems start here; novels finish here", Boyd Tonkin, "New Writing 15", Evaristo and Gee (eds), Granta/British Council, 2007, p.281
• "'poetry' is a genre, with fiction, drama, and the various nonfiction genres (autobiography, travelogue, epistles, journalism, and so forth), whereas 'verse' is a mode like prose, and again, any of the genres may be written in either of the modes", Turco, The Book of Forms, 2000, p.250
• • "An important difference between poetic and non-poetic text is that for ordinary language the number of structural levels and their meaningful elements is restricted and known to the speaker in advance, whereas for the poetic text it remains for the reader or listener to establish the nature of the aggregate of code systems that regulate the text. Therefore, any system of regularities can in principle be perceived as meaningful in poetry", p.68
  • "Prose is a later phenomenon than poetry, arising in a period of chronologically more mature esthetic consciousness ... notwithstanding its seeming simplicity and closeness to ordinary speech, prose is esthetically more complex than poetry", p.24
  From "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976
• "In poetry it is the choice of expression that determines the content, whereas in prose it is the opposite; it is the world the author chooses, the events that happen in it, that dictate its rhythm, style, and even verbal choices", "on literature", Umberto Eco, Secker & Warburg, 2005, p.313
• "The terms poetry and prose are incorrectly opposed to each other. Verse is, properly, the contrary of prose ... and writing should be divided, not into poetry and prose, but into poetry and philosophy", Rev William Enfield, "Monthly Magazine", II (1796), p.453-6
• "Much confusion has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science", Wordsworth, "Wordsworth's literary Criticism", p.21
• "No truth, it seems to me, is too precious, no observation too profound, and no sentiment too exalted to be expressed in prose", AE Housman
• "poetry is now more quintessentially poetical than ever before; 'purer' in the negative sense. It not only does (like all good poetry) what prose can't do: it deliberately refrains from doing anything that prose can do", "An Experiment in Criticism", CS Lewis, CUP, 1961, p.97
• "I'm being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but only somewhat when I say that a poem is the city of language just as prose is its countryside. Prose extends laterally filling the page's horizon unimpeded, while poetry is marked by dense verticality, by layerings of meaning and sound. Cities and poetry also share compression, heterogeneity, juxtaposition", Cole Swensen, identitytheory.com
• "Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose." - Basil Bunting
• "all the modern experiments in reading seek to make the poem end as a novel and the novel as a poem" - Mallarme, 1892, letter to Georges Rodenbach.
• "In Bakhtin's scheme of genres, poetry is characteristically monological. ... 'Stream of consciousness' is a belated rearguard action to confine the novel within the linguistic modes and norms of poetry" - Charles Lock, Stand 2(4)/3(1), p.81
• "Many great novelists begin by aspiring to poetry or drama ... there may be only one major poet who would have preferred to have been a novelist: Boris Pasternak", Charles Lock, Stand 2(4)/3(1), p.74
• "neither meter nor rhyme are sufficient conditions for an identification of a text as a poem" - "Linguistic Structures in Poetry", S.R. Levin, The Hague:Mouton, 1962
• "Prose ... must return to its only purpose; to clarify to enlighten the understanding. There is no form to prose but that which depends on clarity. If prose is not accurately adjusted to the exposition of facts it does not exist ... Poetry is something quite different. Poetry has to do with the crystallization of the imagination - the perfection of new forms as additions to nature", WC Williams, "Imaginations", New Directions, 1970, p.116-17, 140.
• "the insistence that poetry partake of the lofty and sublime ... meant that poetry abandoned large areas of subject matter as 'unpoetic'. These areas were eagerly seized on by the newly enfranchized medium of prose .. In essence [the free verse reform] took away from poetry what had always been its distinguishing and defining characteristic, metre, and offered in metre's place nothing which prose could not already accomplish much better", Dick Davis, Poetry Durham, 28, p.33.
• • "No matter what the preliminary prose form, the prose poem must deviate at some level from the convention in order to establish itself as other. This deviation may rest at the level of the larger structures of convention, resulting in parody of the older, traditional genre ... or it may be more profoundly disruptive, mangling syntactic and semantic structures", p.82
  • "Above all, the prose poem is a heterogeneous form - not as a simple compromise between poetry and prose, but as a form that almost inevitably brings diverse genres of prose into tension with one another", p.90.
  From "A Tradition of Subversion", M.S. Murphy, Univ of Mass. Press, 1992.
• "So often, when reading 'free' verse, I can see no reason why a line ends where it does; why the poet did not write it out as a prose-poem", Auden, "On Technique", Agenda V10.4, 1972.
• "the lines allow for the visual interruption of the phrase (or sentence) without necessarily requiring a temporal interruption, a pause. ... I can ... set in motion a counter-measure that adds to the rhythmic richness of the poem" - Bernstein, "An Interview".
• "The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower" - Michael Longley in "How Poets Work", Tony Curtis, 1996, Seren, p.118.
• "to have the virtues of good prose is the first and minimum requirement of great poetry", T.S. Eliot.
• "Verse is always struggling, while remaining verse, to take up more and more of what is prose, to take something more from life and turn it into 'play'", T.S. Eliot, "Prose and Verse", The Chapbook 22, 1921, p.9
• Samuel Johnson's style is a "species of rhyming in prose ... each sentence, revolving round its centre of gravity, is contained with itself like a couplet, and each paragraph forms itself into a stanza", William Hazlitt, Complete Works (ed P.P. Howe), 1931, V6, p.102
• "Too many poets today think that not to write prose is certainly to write poetry" - Samuel Johnson, 1777
• "In prose as in algebra concrete things are embodied in signs or counters which are moved about according to the rules, without being visualised at all in the process ... One only changes the X's and Y's back into physical things at the end of the process. Poetry, in one aspect at any rate, may be considered as an effort to avoid this characteristic of prose ... It chooses fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new, and we are tired of the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract counters.", Hulme
• "What line breaks add to prose prosody is a connection between eye and ear which emphasizes the nature of the language by ... creating units of intent and emphasis, and by contouring the melodic pitch changes in the narrative-line", Diane Wakoski, "Eye & Ear: A Manifesto" in "The Ohio Review", V.38 (1987), p.17.
• • p.108 - "Conventions associated with lineation appears to have emerged originally from the economic needs of the book-trade in Alexandria ... First the size of the rolls was standardised so that they were easier to transport. Later the lines contained in the columns of prose writing in any one roll were made almost equal in length. ... By this standard length, payment of the scribe and the price of the book were fixed."
  • p.1 - "Old English text is written continuously across the page, filling the valuable vellum from left to right margin"
  • p.20 - "colour ... in early Middle English texts is sometimes used to mark the beginning of a metrical unit in texts without lineation"
  • p.101 - "the practise [of lineation in English poetry] is clearly not established for late Old English poetry in the mid-eleventh century and that it is well established, especially for socially valued reproductions of texts, by the end of the fourteenth century."
  • p.114 - "The practice of bracketing lines in various ways to indicate rhyme schemes is also frequently encountered in manuscripts with the dominant one verse per line layout"
  • p.25 - "The interrelating of sound pattern and visual line is so well established that modern poetry, even when without traditional metrical regularity or rhyme scheme, may encourage us to read in a certain way according to the line breaks."
  From "The Written Poem", Rosemary Huisman, Cassell, 1998.
• • "Obtrusive irregularity (poetic deviation) and obtrusive regularity (parallelism) account for most of what is characteristic of poetic language"
  • "The feeling of 'heightening' in poetic language is, in part, nothing more than the consciousness that it is strange and arresting by the side of common usage."
  • "in judging [traditional modes of foregrounding and contrivances] we clearly have to take account of the different standards of different periods. We live at a time when poetic heightening for its own sake, i.e. the contrived distancing of poetic language from 'ordinary' language, tends to be avoided by poets and condemned by critics. Our demand for a justification of parallelism is stronger than that of other ages."
  From "A linguistic guide to English poetry", Geoffrey N. Leech, Longman, 1969.
• "an abundance of blank verse lines in English prose usually indicates an incursion of solemnity or melancholy". F Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" story has examples, p.114, "Oulipo Compendium", Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie (eds), Atlas Press 1998
• "I think many people (like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose; it gives you more to go by; the conventions of poetry have been getting far off from normal life, so that to have a prose bridge make reading poetry seem more natural" - William Empson, "The Complete Poems of William Empson", John Haffenden, Penguin, 2000. p.112.
• "In the classical period, prose and poetry are quantities, their difference can be measured ... modern poetry is a quality sui generis and without antecedents. It is no longer an attribute but a substance, and therefore it can very well renounce signs, since it ... does not need to signal its identity outwardly: poetic language and prosaic language are sufficiently separate to be able to dispense with the very signs of their difference. ... modern poetry is opposed to classical art by a difference which involves the whole structure of language, without leaving between those two types of poetry anything in common except the same sociological intention. ... modern poetry, since it must be distinguished from classical poetry and from any type of prose, destroys the spontaneous functional nature of language, and leaves standing only its lexical basis", Barthes, "Writing Degree Zero"
• "Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves. This is why it clouds the language, increases as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified", Barthes, "Myth Today"
• "we read prose, we listen (albeit internally) to poetry", ra page, "hyphen", Comma Press, 2003, p.xiii

Linear/Spatial Form (back to top)

• "The least effective method of describing landscape is by cataloguing all the things in it. Language is successive and contrastive, space is simultaneous and without emphasis. .. A method of rendering landscape ... by minimal signs distributed around a suggested shape .... Carefully breaking down the successive feature of language structure, so that A does not disappear when we move onto B", Andrew Duncan, "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", 2003, p.199
• "Spatial Form (modernist poetics) gives unity to a literary work by a pattern of interconnected motifs that can only be perceived by 'reading over'", "The Art of Fiction", Lodge, p.82
• • "the internal conflict between the time-logic of language and the space-logic implicit in the modern conception of the nature of poetry."
  • "The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time ... modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity"
  From "Spatial Form in Modern Literature", J. Frank, Sewanee Review (1945) (see also "Spatial Form: Thirty Years After" in "Spatial Form in Narrative", Smitten and Daghistany, Cornell Univ Press, 1981)
• "[Frye] argues that whatever literary structure is in itself, it must be spatial to the critic", "Beyond Formalism", G.H. Hartman, Yale University Press, 1970, p.13.
• "Deconstruction of the image: 1) presented as inherently deceptive (Ashbery); 2) word as Image (Concrete); 3) Images give way to syntax. "Making strange" now occurs at the level of the phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level of the image cluster (Coolidge, Bernstein, Andrews, Gertrude Stein)", "Radical Artifice", Marjorie Perloff, 1991, University of Chicago Press
• • p.87 - "When ordinarily unassociated elements are juxtaposed, they constitute a 'place of indeterminacy' (Ingarden) that the reader is called upon to determine. But if this determination is not logically possible, if the relation between the two is undecidable, something else appears in this gap. Eliot and Pound spoke of 'emotion'"
  • p.98 - "the order of words (in most languages) is meaningful, whereas the order of saccadic recurrence (in most visual acts) is not."
  From "The Poetics of the Mind's Eye", C Collins, Univ of Pennsylvania, 1991
• "Browning ... makes a conscious and concerted effort to disrupt the linearity of time ... through interior and exterior monologues, and through the juxtaposition of opposing points of view", "Modernist Form", J. S. Childs, Associated University Presses, 1986, p.72.
• "Abrupt and disordered syntax can be at times very honest, and an elaborately constructed sentence can be at times merely an elaborate camouflage", "A B C of Reading", Erza Pound, p.86.
• "We no longer think or need to think in terms of monolinear logic, the sentence structure, subject, predicate, object etc. We are as capable or almost as capable as the biologist of thinking thoughts that join like spokes in a wheel-hub and that fuse in hyper-geometric amalgams", Erza Pound
• "In the past, various bridges have been found to fill the gaps of short poems: Rhyme, melody, common religious and social outlooks, and, in the individualism of the Renaissance, the person of the poet. Thus, to bridge the gaps in the disparate images of a metaphysical poem, a reader must evoke the figure who would join the elements, and this has remained generally the mode of gap-filling until the advent of Imagism in the twentieth century." - Jerome Mazzaro, in Salmagundi No. 22-23, p.184.
• "collagism is mostly frowned on by English critics (and many poets, too), for whom consistency of tone and unwavering vision are taken to be supreme virtues" - John Lucas, Other Poetry, II.27

Meaning (back to top)

• "We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other", Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, No.531
• "Riddles tend to be visual and conceptual, charms tend to be aural and hypnotic", Elenor Cook, "Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens", Princeton, 1988, p.16
• "Nonsense is a play against sense, a reversal of values, whereas magic operates in a different system altogether", p.44, "The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens", Anca Rosu, Univ of Alabama Press, 1995
• "I'm ... mildly distressed at not being able to give a satisfactory account of my work because in certain moods this inability seems like a limit to my powers of invention. After all, if I can invent poetry, why can't I invent the meaning?", Ashbery, "Other Traditions", p.2
• "Expressive realism finds [the guarantee of text's meaning] in the author's mind, or in the world we know, or in the conjunction of the two - the author's perception of the world we know. New Criticism is uncertain whether to locate it in language or in human experience. Frye finds it in human anxieties and aspirations. The reader-theorists finally invoke a reader, variously defined ... and this reader constitutes the authority for the meaning of the text.", Catherine Belsey, "Critical Practice", Routledge, 1980, p.52
• "Meaning in practical communication is achieved through a kind of speed in which an action of understanding annuls the multiple possibilities opened by words themselves and prevents our falling into the abyss.", "Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice", C. Crow, CUP, 1982, p.49
• "In Surrealist metaphor, two terms are juxtaposed so as to create a third which is more strangely potent than the sum of the parts ... The third term forces an equality of attention onto the originating terms", "Statutes of Liberty", Geoff Ward, Macmillan, 1993, p. 73-74.
• "The New Sentence", Ron Silliman, Roof, 1987, discusses means of inhibiting integration of words into higher grammatical levels and keeps "the reader's attention at or very close to the level of language".(p.63).
• • p.1 - "Until recently ... most critics assumed, like Dr Johnson, that great literature was universal and expressed general truths about human life, and that therefore readers required no special knowledge or language"
  • p.36 - "We refuse to allow a text to remain alien and outside our frames of reference; we insist on 'naturalising' it, and effacing its textuality"
  • p.53 - "During the second half of the eighteenth century, commentators began to question whether Pope was a poet at all and to suggest that he was a clever versifier who put prose into rhyming couplets and lacked the imaginative power required of true poetry."
  • p.144 - "Derrida - People desire a centre because it guarantees 'being as presence'. logocentrism (entering into an argument about x by mentioning not- x admits to that axis). diff'erance = defferal."
  From "A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory", R Seldon, P Widdowson, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993
• I.A. Richards - misreadings are commmonly caused by: failure to make out plain sense; poor sensuous apprehension; erratic evocation of imagery; susceptibility to mnemonic irrelevancies; stock responses; overfacility or inhibition of emotions; irrelevant adherence to belief/doctrines; rigid technical/critical preconceptions
• "Language ... is an infinitude of used or potential poems waiting to be moulded into new realities" - Friedrich, "The Language Parallax", Univ of Texas Press, 1986.
• "The Pursuit of Signs", J. Culler, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. p.219 "literary work should be regarded not as an object whose properties the student seeks to know but rather as an experience of the reader, so that false starts, errors, changes of mind are to be thought of, not as undesirable experiences of ill-prepared students, but as part of the experience, and thus part of the meaning of the work" (Stanley Fish, "Self-Consuming Artifacts").
• "When presented with a word we first of all perceive a 'sphere of meaning'. This general impression is invariably in terms of qualities which we would associate with the word", "Microgenesis and Aphasia", Heinz Werner, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1956, 52, 347- 53.
• "the problem of the poet, if he is to produce work which forces his readers to experience real perception, is how to make recognition difficult and perception inevitable. The poem should give an immediate impression of having a 'message' function, in order to achieve unity, but not more than an impression need be provided at the most accessible 'levels' of the poem.", "Poetic Truth", Robin Skelton, Heinemann, 1978. p. 88.
• "According to phenomenological principles, an object can never be described satisfactorily merely from one perspective ... the artistic imagination foreshortens the perspective towards the material object", HH Rudnick, "Analecta Husserliana IV", Kluwer,???
• "The individual differences among concretizations enable us to establish what belongs to the work itself and what belongs to the concretizations conditioned by contingencies", Ingarden, "Literary Work of Art", 336-37.
• "Their structure is an integration of dissonant meanings that exhibits a Gestalt-like new meaning that is not reducible to the integration - this new meaning is referred to by I.A.Richards as 'the resultant meaning', by Paul Henle as 'induced content', and by Max Black as a 'created similarity'" ("Philosophy of Rhetoric", "Language, Thought and Culture", "More about Metaphor").
• "The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be ... to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him." T.S. Eliot, "The Use of Poetry", 1933
• "This is the first century which has tried to appreciate all the art works that ever were, anywhere ... Four major thinkers, Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud, gave grounds for the belief that the artist often does not know what he is doing", William Empson, "Argufying", Chatto & Windus, 1987, p.147.

Truth/Beauty (back to top)

• "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth", Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey
• "poetry is seeking to make not meaning but beauty", Basil Bunting, Stand V8.2, p.28
• "I don't believe that one can dehistoricize and decontextualize cultural production and come up with anything that isn't stripped of a large measure of its liveliness. Isolation in the realm of bestness does, of course, tend to focus on a poem's beauty.", Lyn Hejinian, "The Best American Poetry", 2004, p.11
• "From beauty no road leads to reality ... The power of beauty affects the naked being, as though he had never lived", Hannah Arendt, "Rahel Varnhagen", p.88-89
• "Beauty reveals everything because it expresses nothing", Wilde
• "although it is possible to reach what I have stated to be the first end of art, the representation of facts, without reaching the second, the representation of thoughts, yet it is altogether impossible to reach the second with having previously reached the first ... no artist can be graceful, imaginative, or original, unless he be truthful", Ruskin, "Modern Painters", Vol III, p.133-9
• "Art is not truth. It is a lie that makes us realize truth", Braque
• "In the traditional idea of form we naturally find beauty as the pacifying meeting between the visible and the true", F. Carmagnola, "Parentesi perdute", Guerrini & Associati, 1998, p.44 (my translation)
• "We always take it for granted that all that is beautiful is art, and that all art is beautiful ... This identification of art with beauty is the root of all the difficulties of judgement", Herbert Read, "The Meaning of Art", 1955
• "Art arises out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical", Auden, "The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays", 1963, p.336.
• "Every poem starts out as either true or beautiful. Then you try to make the true ones seem beautiful and the beautiful ones true", Larkin, "Larkin at 60", p.113.

Obscurity/Ambiguity (back to top)

• "One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most 'intellectual' piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?", Geoffrey Hill, "Paris Review", 2000
• "why should I start trying to read something ... if I later discover that I have wasted my time? Such questions reveal an overwrought case of contracting the Protestant work effort on the part of their posers. They overstate and reinforce values belonging to phallogocentric investiture", cris cheek in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 , p.253
• "Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading?", Keats, letters, p.52-3
• "Its alleged obscurity is due not to its own nature, which is to enlighten, but the darkness which it explores, and must explore: the dark of the soul herself and the dark of the mystery which envelops human existence", St-John Perse, "On Poetry", p.11
• "There is a certain glory in not being understood", Baudelaire, The Structure of Modern Poetry (Friedrich, p.4)
• "difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. If you write as if you had to placate or in any way entice their lack of interest, then I think you are making condescending assumptions about people", Geoffrey Hill
• "The relationship between an artist and reality is always an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can only approach that reality by indirect means.", Richard Wilbur, Quarterly Review of Literature 7, p.189
• 4 types of difficulty
  • Contingent (by far the most common). Problems can (at least in theory) be looked-up - "Contingent difficulties arise from the obvious plurality and individuation which characterize world and word.", p.33
  • Modal - the work is "inaccessible", "alien", "not poetry". Doubts about purpose. But there may be a liking/understanding issue. "Modal difficulties lie with the beholder", "modal difficulties challenge the inevitable parochialism of honest empathy", "Current man seeks to efface [the distinction between Contingent and Modal difficulties]. We are ashamed to concede any modal inhibition, to confess ourselves closed to any expressive act however remote from our own time and place", p.32.
  • Tactical - "source in the writer's will or in the failure of adequacy between his intention and his performative means", p.33. Some poets feel they must create new words and syntactic modes, for how else can they say new things? But once people understand the words, these too will be shop-worn. So instead revitalise old uses; undermine, distort. "We are not meant to understand easily and quickly". "'Contingently' and 'modally' Wallace Stevens's 'Anecdote of the Jar' is transparent" - Clear message: "however simple[], the work of art [] sets ordinance upon the surrounding chaos of the organic" but "It is the last two lines that obstruct and unsettle" "This rich undecidability is exactly what the poet aims at. It can be made a hollow trick (as it often is with the syntactic instabilities in Dylan Thomas)." Or it can make us "reach out towards more delicate orderings of perception"
  • Ontological (breaks the poet/reader contract). "At certain levels, we are not meant to understand at all ... But again we ask: for whom, then is the poet writing, let alone publishing? .. It is not so much the poet who speaks, but language itself", p.45
  From "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner, OUP, 1972
• • "It is precisely because poetry is ambiguous that it becomes irreducible, in that a particular arrangement of words may contain so much meaning that it could not possibly be put any other way", p.43
  • "a poem's exactness or appropriateness comes from its being simultaneously complex and irreducible, rather than unambiguously monovalent", p.44
  From "Form and Function" by NS Thompson (in PN Review V29.5)
• "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity" - Wittgenstein.
• "you must hide profundity. Where? On the surface", Hofmannsthal, the Chandos letter.
• "clarity can mislead: the precise, specific, concrete image offers us a thousand things to take up which are not to the author's purpose. The blurred or generalized meaning avoids that danger", I.A. Richards, "How to Read a Page", p.80
• • "modes of obscurity are important signifying structures in literature and carry distinct kinds of meaning which are not secondary to an anterior obscured content" (p. 18).
  • "the work of art is not here considered an illusory copy of a true and real object, but a true and real reproduction of an illusory reality" (p. 65).
  From "The Uses of Obscurity", Allon White, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
• • p. 28 - "The demands of metre allow the poet to say something which is not normal colloquial English, so that the reader thinks of the various colloquial forms which are near to it ... It is for these reasons ... that an insensitivity in a poet to the contemporary style of speaking, into which he has been trained to concentrate his powers of apprehension, is so disastrous, can be noticed so quickly, and produces that curious thinness of blurring of texture"
  • p.160 - "In so far as an ambiguity sustains intricacy, delicacy, or compression of thought, or is an opportunism devoted to saying quickly what the reader already understands, it is to be respected .... It is not to be respected in so far as it is due to weakness or thinness of thought, obscures the matter in hand unnecessarily, ... or, when the interest of the passage is not focussed upon it, ... if the reader will not easily understand the ideas which are being shuffled ... The question is here one of focus; and it is in modern poetry, when the range of ideas is great and the difficulty of holding the right ones in mind becomes acute, ... that ambiguity is most misused."
  • p.167 - "It is tactful, when making an obscure reference, to arrange that the verse shall be intelligible even when the reference is not understood."
  From "Seven Types of Ambiguity", W. Empson, The Hogarth Press, 1984
• • p.95 - "The play of subjectivity on the perception of ambiguity forms a substantial portion of psycholinguistics and psychological studies on the phenomenum" ("Student Performance in Recognizing and Interpreting Ambiguity in Poems and Paintings", Weil (unpublished PhD Thesis, New York Univ). ... "However, reader-relativity could become a stumbling-block in a theory-orientated study ... The hypothetical reader ... has been described as (a) an ideal reader (Culler) ... , (b) a mock reader (Gibson) ... , (c) a super-reader (Riffaterre) ... , (d) an informed reader (Fish) ... , (e) an implied reader (Iser) ... , (f) an intended reader (Wolff) ... "
  • p.113 - (ambiguity) frustrates the question of 'which is the intended meaning?' and ... (indeterminacy) frustrates the question of 'what is the intended meaning?'. By analogy, it is a rabbit-duck representation versus a Rorschach inkblot.
  • "And in truth ambiguity may often add strength. An idea suggested is more weighty: simplicity of statement excites contempt", "On Style", Demetrius (254)
  • p.116 - "potentially ambiguous words possess distinct, disparate but clear meanings which are relevant as alternatives in a given context, although there is uncertainty which to select as more appropriate. Any lack of clarity lies at the pragmatic level where the intended meaning is not clear to the reader. In the case of obscurity, on the other hand, lack of clarity occurs at the semantic level itself. ... Obscurity is, therefore, different from ambiguity, but it can provide the latitude for ambiguity to occur in."
  From "Lexical Ambiguity in Poetry", Soon Peng Su, Longman, 1994
• "One of two kinds of clearness one should have - either the meaning to be felt without effort as fast as one reads or else, if dark at first reading, when once made out to explode", Hopkins, "Letters to Bridges", p.90.
• "The proliferation of resemblances extends an object. The point at which this process begins, or rather at which this growth begins, is the point at which ambiguity has been reached" - "The Necessary Angel", Wallace Stevens, 1942
• "Obscurity in a poem must be a tool. It is there to force the reader to ask questions which will direct him toward an understanding of the poem. Any question which does not directly increase our understanding of the poem distracts from it.", Stephen Dobyns, from "Metaphor and the Authenticating Act of Memory".
• "Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry" - William Empson, "Argufying", 1987.
• "The general public ... has set up a criterion of its own, one by which every form of contemporary art is condemned. This criterion is, in the case of music, melody; in the case of painting, representation; in the case of poetry, clarity. In each case one simple aspect is made the test of a complicated whole, becomes a sort of loyalty oath for the work of art. ... instead of having to perceive, to enter, and to interpret those new worlds which new works of art are, the public can notice at a glance whether or not these pay lip-service to its own 'principles'" - "The Obscurity of the Poet", Randall Jarrell

Metaphor (back to top)

• • p.51 - "With respect to ... existing basic metaphors ..., there are three stances that poets have chosen... 1) to versify them in automatic ways ... 2) to deploy them masterfully, combining them, extending them and crystallizing them in strong images 3) to step outside the ordinary ways we think metaphorically ... by employing them in unusual ways, or otherwise destabilize them and thus reveal their inadequacies for making sense of reality"
  • p.65 - "We have now identified the following sources of power of metaphor: The power to structure ... The power of options ... The power of reason... The power of evaluation ... The power of being there"
  • p.67 - "Poetic thought uses the mechanisms of everyday thought, but it extends them, elaborates them, and combines them in ways that go beyond the ordinary...Extending...Elaborating ... Questioning ... Composing"
  • p.71 - "The mode of metaphorical thought that poets use and invoke in their readers goes beyond ordinary metaphoric thought by including these elements: - The novel extension of the metaphor to include elements otherwise not mapped - The imaginative filling in of special cases - The formation of composite metaphors - Explicit commentary on the limitation of conceptual metaphors, and the offering of an alternative."
  • p.89 - "Complex metaphors grip us party because they awake in us the experience and knowledge that form the grounding of those metaphors, partly because they make the coherence of that experience and knowledge resonate, and partly because they lead us to form new coherences in what we know and experience."
  From "More than Cool Reason", G. Lakoff and M. Turner, University of Chicago Press, 1989.
• • "In literary reading, metaphors may function as important cystallisation points for the feeling of subjectivity, polyvalence, fictionality, and form-as-meaning", p.36
  • "Metaphor is often regarded as a miniature work of verbal art", p.49
  From "Understanding Metaphor in Literature", G.Steen, Longman, 1994.
• "I have come to believe that what seems poverty is sometimes economy; and that this economy in metaphor produces effects which I call 'poetical'", "Purity of Diction in English Verse", Donald Davie, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967, p.1
• • p.339 - "figures of speech may be characterized by overspecified ends and indeterminate middles. ... the strength of the end terms depends on our seeing the elided members of the chain. ...; the more clearly we see them, the stronger the metaphor which collapses that chain "
  • p.348 - "Human life, like a poetical figure, is an indeterminate middle between overspecified poles always threatening to collapse it....Art narrates that middle region."
  From "Beyond Formalism", G.H. Hartman, Yale University Press, 1970
• • p.14 - "Symbol and metaphor, as opposed to analysis, can allow insight without consequences because perceptions are not stabilised and categorised."
  • p.57 - "Marx, like Darwin, recognised that the avoidance of teleology tended to give greater emphasis to analogies within the natural order"
  • p.80 - "whereas in allegory the one-to-one correspondence of object and meaning is sustained, in analogy the pleasure and power of the form is felt in part because it is precarious"
  From "Darwin's Plots", Gillian Beer, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983

The Arbitrary Sign (back to top)

• "Arbitrary and conventional is a fitting description of distinctive sounds, less so of words, even less of sentences, and beyond that scarcely fits at all", "Language. The Loaded Weapon", Bolinger, Longman, 1980, p.18
• "Context and use (Wittgenstein's twin criteria) erode the arbitrariness of the sign, making it very difficult for us as readers to free up even phonemes from their referential dimension(s)", Miles Champion, "binary myths", (Andy Brown ed.), p.41.
• "Take a bunch of roses; I use it to signify my passion. Do we have here, then, only a signifier and a signified, the roses and my passion? ...But on the plane of analysis, we do have three terms; for these roses weighted with passion perfectly are correctly allow themselves to be decomposed into roses and passion: the former and the latter existed before uniting and forming this third object, which is the sign.", "Myth Today", Barthes, p.121.

Writer/Reader (back to top)

• "Because of a complex web of issues, some having to do with print, law, and money, we now tend to think of the author as an important presence in the poem", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.94
• "[the author is] a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circuulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction", Foucault, "What is an Author?"
• "We read according to an undeclared handicap system, to the specific needs of the author. We meet the novelists a little way, the poets at least halfway, the translated poets three-quarters of the way; the Postmoderns we pick up at the station in their wheelchairs.", Don Paterson, "The Book of Shadows"
• "The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself" - "Tristram Shandy", Laurence Sterne
• "When he thinks of the points which you have omitted, he becomes not only a hearer, but a witness ... To press home every detail, as though your hearer were a fool, seems like casting a slur on his intelligence" - "On Style", Demetrius (222)
• "Creativity on the part of the author involves structural innovation, the ability to generate an, in principle, infinite number of different structures. But the reader's creativity is expressed by functional innovation: the ability to imagine what a text could mean" - "The Bounds of Interpretation", Schauber and Spolsky, Stanford University Press, 1986, p.119
• "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author", Barthes, "Death of the Author".
• "the reading process can be represented as a one-sided bargaining process of imperfect information ...
  mutual interdependence (reflexivity)
  fixed order of play
  one-sidedness of the communicative process
  possibility of limited pre-play communication (e.g. by means of publishing, advertising, generic conventions)
  inability to make side-payments or binding agreements
  ", "The Role of Game Theory in Literature Studies", Peter Swirski in "Empirical Approaches to Literature", ed Gebhard Rusch, 1995, p.41

Sound (back to top)

• "To [Elizabeth Bishop], the images and the music of the lines were primary. If we comprehended the sound, eventually we would understand the sense", Dana Gioia
• "The sounds, acting together with the measure, are a kind of extended onomatopoeia - i.e., they imitate, not the sounds of an experience ... but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture", Denise Levertov
• "[belief in the iconic function of] the phonetic effect of a poem ... is almost always completely fallacious", John Crowe Ranson, "Wanted: An Ontological Critic", p.38
• "The line is from 'The Eve of Saint Agnes':
       And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.
  ... I had been dizzily in love with it for months before I became consciously aware of its extraordinary symmetry. Moving inward from each extremity, we see the letter D at either end, moving through a succession of Ls, Ss, Ps and Ns. D - L - N - S - L - P - N - L - P - L - N - D - S - L - D. This may be bollocks to you, but I thought it a miracle. I still think it remarkable", Stephen Fry, "The Ode Less Travelled", Arrow Books, 2007, p.312
• "We benefit from a growing awareness of the interactions - cumulative, contradictory, dislocatory - between meaning and syntax in a literary style. A statistical analysis which shows that sound effects in Pope are likely to coincide with lexical meanings whereas in Donne there is a discordance, probably intentional, between phonetic effects and semantic units, is more than ingenuity. It may induce fundamental insights about the differences in the relations of feelings to expressive means as between metaphysical and Augustan poetics", George Steiner, On Difficulty and Other Essays, OUP, 1972, p.160
• "the proportion between the vowels and consonants in a language will shew the relative influence of the feelings and of the understanding over the people who speak it. ... The vowels express what is felt: they come more immediately from that part of the body which is less under the dominion of the will ... In consonants on the other hand ... one beholds something like the operation of the formative principle on the raw material of language, the shaping and modifying and combining or syllabling action of the intellect.", Julius Hare, quoted in "Tennyson" by Donald Hair, p.63
• "sound enacts meaning as much as designates something meant", Charles Bernstein, "Close listening: Poetry and the Performed Word", 1998, p.17
• "Some avant-garde theorists have turned to sound as a means of dismissing 'voice', which they see as irredeemably mired in humanism's illusions of a monologic, self-present lyric speaker", p.222, Kathleen Crown in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003
• • "From the 1920s onwards, the question whether sounds, as such, possess 'meaning' has stimulated research ... the assumption of a conventional meaning potential of individual sounds seems justified. For this potential to be activated, however, semantic stimuli must be present", p.21
  • "Patterns immediately recognised could possibly influence meaning construction from the very start, thus gaining an 'autonomos' semantic function, whereas others may be chronologically and semantically subordinate to lexical meanings", p.10
  • "top-down (knowledge-based) and bottom-up (stimulus-based) processes combine", p.17
  • "The more obvious a pattern, the more significant its contribution to the meaning may be (the more probable an 'autonomous' semantic function)", p.17
  • Factors affecting obviousness of a pattern include "distance between equivalent sounds; frequency; degree of similarity; size of repeated segment; stress/unstress; statistical frequency of repeated sound; lexical category (function words vs content words); position (on line); stylistic convergence (parallel patterns on other textual levels", p.18
  from "Reader's Strategies in Comprehending Poetic Discourse", P.Begemann in "Approaches to poetry: some aspects of textuality, intertextuality and intermediality", J.Petofi and T.Olivi (eds), Walter de Gruyter, 1994.
• "Not infrequently I have found myself explaining to students of literature, supposedly past the training level, that no assonance occurs in some such line as The lonely dove moves not with mothlike wing", A.A.Hill "Constituent and Pattern in Poetry", Univ of Texas Press, 1976, p.14
• "Alliteration can be used as a stylistic effect in English by making it coincide with recurrent strongly stressed syllables preceded by a pause that is at least minimal. Since French lacks the stress and pause patterns of coontrast found in English, alliteration becomes merely pointless repetition", A.A.Hill "Constituent and Pattern in Poetry", Univ of Texas Press, 1976, p.15.
• "sound in its due place is as much true as knowledge (and all that mere claptrap about information and learning). Rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in the shared place", J.H.Prynne, letter in The English Intelligencer
• "And it is that focus of attention on the materiality of language as it does its work of bringing meaning into being that has so often been interpreted as mimetic or iconic representation, because the experience is unquestionably one of increased vividness or intensity of signification ...it creates what Valéry calls the "illusion" (and in literature illusions are what matter) of a more direct involvement in those qualities than language normally attains. And it is only an apparent paradox that this illusion is created - as Jacobson realized - by means of a heightening of our apprehension of the medium that stands between us and direct experience itself. Understood in this way, onomatopeia might be seen as a model of all literary language", Derek Attridge, "Peculiar Language", Methuen, 1988, p.154
• "The operation of nonce-constellations is probably more significant than genuine phonesthemes in onomatopoeic effects; see, for instance, John Hollander's exemplary account in Vision and Resonance, p.157, of Tennyson's regularly cited murmuring bees.", Derek Attridge, "Peculiar Language", Methuen, 1988, p. 152
• "poetry is not the only area where sound symbolism makes itself felt, but it is a province where the internal nexus between sound and meaning changes from latent to patent and manifests itself most palpably and intensely", Jakobsen, "Linguistics and Poetics", p.373
• "Bunting would say that you should hear the 'meaning' of the poetry purely in the sound...Word patterns which may at first appear dense and complicated on the page become articulated and clarified, resonating across the poems' structure. The subtleties and echoes of language which hold a poem together are revealed by the process of sounding it", Richard Caddel, "Basil Bunting: Complete Poems", Bloodaxe, 2000, p.12
• [a poet] "must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre", Frost, letter to John T Bartlett, 1913.
• "the proliferation of 'oo' sounds that rhyme in [Plath's Daddy] ... a sound that is both babyish, and associated with erotic excitement", "The Other Sylvia Plath", Tracy Brain, Pearson, Education Ltd, 2001, p.62
• When Ajax heaves some rock's vast weight to throw
  The line too labours and the words move slow
  Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
  Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main
  Pope, "Essay on Criticism".
• "Take care of the sense and the sounds will look after themselves" (the Duchess to Alice)
• "But precisely because [the pun] is such a mini-phenomenon, it dramatizes the differential or, as de Saussure calls it, diacritical relation of sound to meaning. ... Split the atom of sound (and speech is fission) and you detonate an astonishing charge of meaning", "Beyond Formalism", G.H. Hartman, Yale University Press, 1970, p.341.
• "Bellflowers, seldom seen now, stellar, trim.- Note the triple statement of the el(l) sound counterpointed against the duple m; the narrowing of el(l)'s vowel to ee and i - boldly interrupted by recapitulation of ow; and the modulation of s through st to t" (Of Talisman, by Peter Dale, W.G. Shepherd in Agenda 33.1.
• In 'on the wet road between the chafing grass' (from Auden's "The Watershed") "'chafing' ... allows us to hear through its lingering vowel and caressing fricative the whisper and friction of wind along a hillside", Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, p.123
• • p.22 - "sound awakens in us a sudden awareness of our physical existence in time."
  • p.55 - "The remarkable result of Valéry's treatment of sound and sense as consciously separated variables is that it allows the semantic components of the poem to take on structural value and the structural values of the poem to take part in a semantic or signifying action in turn"
  • p.84 - "Through sound we are never allowed to forget the substance of consciousness as 'being'."
  From "Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice", C. Crow, CUP, 1982
• "The ear is satisfied when the metre is balanced and the rhyme struck, but the sentence is incomplete and the mind seeks its satisfaction in resolution of the sense... By the counterpoint - a kind of suspense - created between the arrangement of sounds and the construing of sense, a pace builds and a drama develops", Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets", 1998, p.30
• "having verse set to music is like looking at a painting through a stained glass window" - Valéry
• "the music of poetry is not something which exists apart from its meaning", T.S.Eliot, "The Music of Poetry", 1942.
• "poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music", Pound, "ABC of Reading", 1991, p.4
• "Music (or sound) must thus be regarded as another dimension of language not less important than syntax and semantics, although it is usually underestimated because we are accustomed to viewing sound as a conventional, material carrier of meaning", Anca Rosu, "The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens", Univ of Alabama Press, 1995, p.14
• "The classic prejudice persists, however, that sound is secondary to meaning. The prejudice has been challenged by John Hollander, who, seeking to show the relation between sound and poetic meaning, discovers that sound pattern can play the role of an allegory or metaphor of the poem's content the role of sound in language becomes clear only when expression becomes artistic, so that language exceeds its purely representational function", Anca Rosu,"The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens", Univ of Alabama Press, 1995, p.17
• • p.1 "The attempt will be made to show first that such terms as 'musical' and 'non-musical' are not only subjective or intuitive descriptions of poetic qualities, but may be defined in terms of phonological skew, i.e. deviation from the normal proportional distribution of sounds in poetic language"
  • p.20 "In summary, it can now be said with some certainty that the conspicuous presence or absence of certain consonant sounds in a poem can help to determine whether the reader will be inclined to perceive that poem as 'musical' or 'non-musical' in tone. The statistics suggest that many sounds have both a positive valence for 'musicality' and a negative valence for 'non-musicality' [or v.v.] Then there is a third class consisting of sounds which apparently have a valence (either positive or negative) for only one of the two qualities. And finally, there are a few consonants [that] have no valence for either of these qualities."
  • p.84 "one of the characteristics of 'tenderness' at least as chosen by this reader, may be a predominance of the reduced vowel in unstressed syllables, whereas 'aggressive' poems may be characterized by a tendency to fill even the unstressed metrical positions with full vowels ... 'tenderness' may be characterized by a tendency to use long vowels in stressed syllables in preference to short ones, in order to slow down the poetic rhythm"
  • p.96 - "there is evidence of something very close to metaphoric quality in the tendency to associate a few types of language sounds with certain quantitative measures, such as frequent occurrence of high front vowels in words which denote smallness ... (Thus, for example, French poets are careful to avoid the word 'nuit' in passages which evoke a night mood, because the 'bright' vowel would intrude...)"
  From "Sound and Sense in the Poetry of Theodor Storm", Alan B. Galt, Herbert Lang, 1973
• • p.51 "As my analysis of the mechanism underlying the statistical correlations between back vowels and such qualities as 'mystic obscurities' and 'hatred and struggle' may suggest, far from being confined to nonaesthetic processes, cognitive poetics provides powerful tools for understanding the relationship between aesthetic qualities and their nonaesthetic perceptual conditions as well as the significant relationships between two or more aesthetic qualities"
  • p.66 "It would appear, then, that the impressionistic-subjective distinction concerning the 'beauty' of some speech sounds and the 'ugliness' of some others can be translated into two pairs of objective or intersubjective opposites. First, the latest acquisitions [the sounds learnt latest by babies] may assume greater emotional or aesthetic intensity than earlier ones, for better or worse. Second, within the late acquisitions, continuous and periodic sounds are beautiful, whereas the interrupted, aperiodic sounds are ugly"
  • p.129 "there is a widespread (presumably intercultural) intuition that the rounded back vowels are dark"
  From "What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?", Reuven Tsur, Duke Univ Press, 1992
• "the nearly universal correlation between the inherently higher-pitched front vowels like English ([i], [I], [e], ...) and smallness and brightness (vs. the lower-pitched back vowels like [u],...[o]..., commonly associated with bigness and darkness). Such relations form part of the lexical fabric of English", Patrizia Violi (ed), "Phonosymbolism and Poetic Language", Brepols Publishers, 2000, p.29
• "The function of sound is, first, to establish differences between words and, second, to create a myriad of form-meaning identity associations across words" Patrizia Violi (ed), "Phonosymbolism and Poetic Language", Brepols Publishers, 2000, p.37
• "The poet who substitutes visual tricks for a surface of articulated sound limits his range of feeling; he gives up the primary means by which feeling can be symbolised and apprehended", Harvey Gross, "Sound and Form in Modern Poetry", Univ of Michigan Press, 1964, p.23
• "Hardy's prosody often fails as an expressive form. In too many of his poems the versification is clumsy, neither subtle nor emphatic. Words are forced into the metrical patterns; the meters themselves are frequently inappropriate to the subject", Harvey Gross, "Sound and Form in Modern Poetry", Univ of Michigan Press, 1964, p.42
• "A purely graphic theory of prosodic measurement has inevitable limitations. Because the ear dominates prosodic theory, auditory phenomena will continue to take precedence in the writing and analysing of verse. Where auditory patterns are strong, typography will be considered secondary. Where auditory patterns are weak, poetry will be accused of being prose. Many readers feel that strong visual patterns do not compensate for the loss of rhyme schemes and scansions.", p.72, "William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure", Stephen Cushman, Yale Univ Press, 1985
• "If we know the topic and basic mood of a given poem, we can predict in what direction and approximately in what measure the relative frequency of certain sounds is likely to deviate from an index number based on statistics of the standard language", "Communication in Poetry", Ivan Fónagy, in Word 17 (1961), p.194

Language (back to top)

• "Kristeva situates poetry at the border of language ... for kristeva the music of poetry is a psychotic return to the babble of the infant who does not yet differentiate between himself and the rest of the world", Fiona Sampson, , in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997, p.262
• "Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information is not used in the language-game of giving information", Wittgenstein, "Zettel"
• "a language seems so much truer and more expressive when we know it less . . . . words need a certain ignorance to keep their power of revelation", Blanchot, "The Work of Fire", Stanford, 1995, p.176
• "deduce all poetry from the very principle of language", Mallarmé
• • "The major vocabulary of the 1940's has death in it, mind in it, thing, time and world in it, concepts more withdrawn than the common traditional God, day, life, man, love, which it also maintains. To the hand and heart it has added head. For traditional fair, sweet, soft, it has substituted old, little, white, adjectives too, withdrawn from directest appreciation." p.408
  • "Much of the writing of Frost, Manifold, Warren seems like metaphysical poetry. The structure is like, with its emphasis on linear control and meditative repetition; the proportioning is like, with more verbs than adjectives in narrative, reasoning, and clausal organization; the tone is like, purposely roughened by particles of speech as talk is", p.431
  • "It may be that the twentieth-century poetry worked against nineteenth, as seventeenth against sixteenth, that is, as an age of self-consciousness against an age of enthusiastic affirmation. At any rate, the dominance of the personal, of death, of the thing concept, of rhyme and argumentation, are characteristic of both reacting periods", p.432
  • "[twentieth-century] poetry has emphasized the ordering and altering powers of human perception, with both feeling and abstraction more implicit than in any other century, and situation explicit", p.493
  • "Verbs are the most stable, the least changing ... The great change in the five centuries is the loss of find, tell, think, and the gain of hear, fall, lie ... Of the major nouns of the 1540's, [day, God, heart, life, love, man, time, king, lord], all but king and lord are primary still for the 1940's.", p.497
  • "[The 1940's] reach back ... to an earlier time for only one word, the thing of the 1540's; otherwise they preserve no majority term which the 1840's have not also preserved", p.498
  • "sound has moved increasingly into the structure, from its boundaries ... In its relation to sense, sound is neither so harmonized in onomatopeia as in the eighteenth century, nor so melodized in expressiveness as in the nineteenth; it returns, as for some poetry in the nineteenth century, to the catching up of speech tones and accents", p.511
  • "As a whole, there are three groups of poets in the period: those who, like Millay, Auden, Frost, Warren, and others, use a proportion of about 8-14-11 [for Adjectives, Nouns and Verbs], with more verbs than adjectives; those who, like Yeats, Stevens, Eliot, tend to balance adjectives and verbs at about 9-18-9; and those who, like Thomas and Sitwell, at about 10-23-8, use more adjectives than verbs, with a high number of nouns. ... The first group is similar in proportion to the Wyatt and Cowley group in the 1640's ... we may fairly call them all 'metaphysical' ... Then the second group ... we may fairly call 'romantic'. These poets carry on the balanced mode which came into being after ... the 1740's ... The third group, finally, has its fullest sources in the 1740's", p.513
  • "Limiting adjectives, those of number, amount, degree .. have shown a decline through the five centuries", p.532
  From "The Primary Language of Poetry in the 1940's", Josephine Miles, Univ of California Press, 1951
• "Metalepsis (a figure with a hidden term which interpretation recovers) ... has the advantage of working with a temporal sequence rather than spatial patterning (which latter is how most figures work - that is, synchronically). As poetry takes place in the tension between synchronic and diachronic, any figure mapping this is most helpful", "Against Coercion: Games Poets Play", Eleanor Cook, Stanford UP, 1998, p.103
• "We must learn to parse sentences and to analyse the grammar of our text, for, as Roman Jakobson has taught us, there is no access to the grammar of poetry, to the nerve and sinew of the poem, if one is blind to the poetry of grammar", George Steiner, "No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1995"
• "the most important question to be asked of any poetic diction concerns its purity or impurity. And that is a question which is never or very seldom asked by modern critics", Donald Davie, "Purity of Diction in English Verse", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967, p.90
• "magician and trickster are the 2 position left once language slides from the world. The magician seeks to reconsile language and reality, the trickster accepts the rupture and exploits the resulting possibilities" - "Dialectic of Enlightenment", Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979, Verso, p.60-72.
• "As language becomes more international and more technical, it will become also less capable of supplying the symbols of literature; and then, just as the development of mechanical devices has compelled us to resort to sport in order to exercise our muscles, so literature will survive as a game", E. Wilson, "Axel's Castle", 1961?, p.225.
• "Bate realizes that the eighteenth century's claim [is] that the past inheres in language, that language can be and is used up by the past and hardens into tradition", P.A. Bove, "Destructive Poetics", Columbia UP, 1975, p.51.
• "If we find continuous-scale contrasts in the vicinity of what we are sure is language, we exclude them from language", C. Hockett, (in 'Structuralist Poetics', Culler, p.14)
• • p. xvi - "Not to squander creative energy on the vain attempt to express experience in language, but to attempt instead to re-stimulate the sources of expressive experience to which language itself has access."
  • p. xviii - "Valéry exploits the self-referentiality of language in order to escape the self-referentiality of literature"
  From "Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice", C. Crow, CUP, 1982
• "In general, the experimentalists developed the abstract potentialities of language without absolutely opposing its normal referential function. They seem to have agreed, at least in so far as language is concerned, with Kandinsky's view that the abstract retains 'the timbre of the organic' rather with Mondrian's idea that any allusion to natural forms interferes with a work's capacity to capture pure reality", "Language in Modern Literature: Innovation and Experiment", Korg, J, Barnes and Noble, 1979, p.165.
• a new language/is a kind of scar/and heals after a while/into a passable imitation/of what went before - "Moise Eire" (Selected Poems) Eavan Boland
• "...the loss of the relative innocence of language is often both the justification and subject of much recent work... A poem, for New Criticism, was an integrated whole, harmonious and reconciling. Its formal equanimity provided a glimpse of a mythic world lived more fully in preindustrial ages, and thus provided consolation for the spoilations of twentieth-century experience. By contrast, recent criticism has tended to stress textual disarray.", Rick Rylance, "Tony Harrison's Languages, Contemporary Poetry meets Modern Theory", ed Easthope and Thompson, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991 p.53
• "We feel all around the words" - Colin Falck
• "the word is a bundle and meaning sticks out of it in various directions" - Mandelstrom
• "Language, according to Saussure, is not a mere tool devised for the re-presentation of a pre-existent reality. It is rather, a constitutive part of reality", "Modern Literary Theory (3rd Edition)", Rice and Waugh, Arnold, 1996, p.3.
• "Words gain their fluctuating meanings from the fluctuating contexts in which people put them. What matters are the relations between these contexts, not the relation of words to reality", Rorty about Derrida, from the Times Higher, Nov 2004.
• "An abstract noun in the possessive case followed by an adjective and a concrete noun ... is a nineteenth century favorite... In the twentieth century it was succeeded in favor by another phrase...in which the first noun is usually concrete and the second abstract. Thus: 'the pale dawn of longing'", "Anatomy of Criticism", Northrop Frye.
• "Linguistics and Poetics", Jakobson. The 6 factors involved in the sending and receiving of any message are: sender, receiver, message, context, contact (the medium), code. A poetic message is distinguished by the dominance of the message. "the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination."
• "I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in Grammar", Nietzche, "Twilight of the Gods"
• • p.74 - "Why, one might ask, have paratactic constructions that so stretch our readerly horizons emerged so pervasively in twentieth-century poetry."
  • p.143 - "According to Roman Jakobson's now familiar tropology, metonomy and metaphor are the two poles of language ... Some topics, such as affects, moods, and complex concepts, provoke that other linguistic pole, metaphor."
  From "The Poetics of the Mind's Eye", C Collins, Univ of Pennsylvania, 1991
• • punctuation may be grammatical-logical or rhythmical-oratorical. Lack of punctuation "may create ambiguities and force the passive reader to become active", p.27.
  • "there was a movement away from rhythmical-oratorical punctuation to grammatical-logical usage between about 1580 and 1680 ... It was only in the decade of the 1840's that the grammatical-logical theories finally triumphed.", p.55 (quoting Mindele Triep).
  • The text may reflect whether it's for listening or reading - visual/aural elements, difficulty, length, poet/audience relationship.
  From "Reading and Listening", B. Engler, Franke Verlag Bern, 1982.
• punctuation "reveals how writers view the balance between spoken and written language", Baron, "Alphabet to email", Routledge, 2000, p.167

Meter (back to top)

• "the absence of a metrical frame accounting for the agreement or variation of every syllable ... makes exact and subtle variation and suggestion impossible", Ivor Winters
• "The demands of metre allow the poet to say something which is not normal colloquial English, so that the reader thinks of the various colloquial forms which are near to it, and puts them together; weighting their probabilities in proportion to their nearness", William Empson, "Seven Types of Ambiguity"
• "Its verses are the liquid, billowy waves, ... always moving, always alike in their nature as rolling waves, but hardly are two exactly alike in size or measure (meter), never having the sense of something finished and fixed, always suggesting something beyond", Whitman, in "With Walt Whitman in Camden", Traubel.

Rhythm (back to top)

• "The regular meter of formal poets is not a dull mechanical ticking, like a clock's; it coalesces out of the rhythms of randomly jotted phrases through a process of 'phase-locking'", Paul Lake in"The Measured Word", Kurt Brown (ed), Univ of Georgia Press, 2001, p.169
• "most of the beauty of the lines and all their variety is gained by the skill with which the woof of speech-rhythm is continually thrown athwart the warp of the metrical type", Henry Newbolt, 1912
• "The difference between the pattern of the line as speech and as metre is often recognised today as tension and is usually highly prized", Thompson, "The Founding of English Metre", Routledge, 1961, p.7
• "The neo-formalists' perhaps unconscious exaltation of the iamb veils their attempt to privilege prevailing white Anglo-Saxon rhythms and culture", Ida Sadoff, Neo-Formalism: A Dangerous Nostalgia, APR, Jan 1990, p.8
• "The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation - the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation- by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety", Yeats, "The Yeats Reader", edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2002), pp. 378-379, p.38
• "Whether easy to recognise or not, rhythm is always the underlying power that governs the word", Calasso, "Literature and the Gods", Knopf, 2001, p.137
• "The claims made by Pound, Eliot in his essay on Arnold, Empson, Hough, Spender and Martin are sometimes daring but they are mistaken. Rhythm cannot express shades of emotion; it does not operate only at a non-conscious level; it cannot express the poet's inner personality; and it is not similar to the rhythms of jazz. What, then, can rhythm actually do in a poem?", James Aitchison, "Quick Reciprocations: The Real Rhythms of Poetry", Agenda
• "Rhythm is neither outside of a poem's meaning nor an ornament on it. Rhythmic structures are expressive forms, cognitive elements", Harvey Gross, "Sound and Form in Modern Poetry", Univ of Michigan Press, 1964, p.12

Rhyme (back to top)

• "The chief pleasure of rhyme is the rage it inspires in its opponents", Valéry
• "I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing", Seamus Heaney, "Death of a Naturalist"
• "I would suggest two particular effects of rhyme: rhyme makes experience from within the body and so can produce unreasoned intimacy; rhyme destabilises the hierarchies of sense and so lends itself to radicalism", Gillian Beer, "The Guardian", January 13, 2007
• "It is not, for instance, an accident that Japanese poetry lacks rhyme. In a language that permits only a very small number of sounds in the final position in phrase and sentence, rhyme occurs everywhere and cannot be used as added ornament", ???, p.15
• "Ancient Russian poetry (psalms, popular lyric, epic) not only did not know rhyme, but even excluded it . Poetry was associated with song ... Rhyme was met only in spoken genres and could not be mixed with singing", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.56
• "Full rhyme affords a basic, primitive pleasure to the literate and illiterate alike; partial rhyme directs itself not only towards the literate but also towards a sophisticated portion of the literate, the readers steeped deeply enough in poetry to appreciate its rarefied formal touches", Stephen Cushman, "Fictions of Form in American Poetry", Princeton University Press, 1993, p.55
• "Rhyme is a non-essential element in verse. Minstrels poured forth their lays of war and love long before the chiming of similar sounds had been thought of. In our own language traces of it are to be found as far back as the tenth century, and although Chaucer may be said to have popularised it in his Canterbury Tales towards the end of the fourteenth century, and all succeeding poets have made us of it more or less, it was long looked down upon as a barbarous innovation, and is still regarded by some as a meretricious aid to 'poesie divine'. All the very greatest poems in all languages are rhymeless.", R.F.Brewer, "Art of Versification and Technicalities of Poetry", 1923
• "A monosyllabic language with no grammar like Chinese clearly needs a good deal of formality in its rules to make poetry different from prose, whereas any language with long inflected words has to accent the words enough to distinguish the roots from the syntax. ... Japanese poetry no less than Greek could ignore rhyme for this simple reason, whereas English is enough like Chinese to make unrhymed melodious verse much harder to write than rhymed ... The crucial thing about English, as a language for poetry is that you cannot rhyme the subject with the verb, because either 'the cat distracts' and 'the nerves swerve' or 'the cats distract' and 'the nerve swerves'; this bit of grammar has been enormously helpful to English poetry by forcing it away from platitude." - William Empson, "Rhyme" (in "Argufying", Empson, Chatto & Windus, 1987, p.134).
• • p.44 - "In Old Saxon, Icelandic, and Anglo-Saxon, alliteration was structural, other rhyme incidental."
  • p.45 - "Before the consolidation of end rhyme in the vernaculars, rhyming effects seems to have been more various and inventive than at any time since."
  • p.43 - "Since stressing and rhyming emerge in history at the same time [10th century latin hymns], very likely in symbiotic relation, that is no prima facie reason to believe that rhyme has any less part in the constitution of the line than meter"
  • p.47 - "In the next phase of this history, the quarrel shifts from quantitative verse against rhyme to blank verse against rhyme"
  • p.49 - "In the final quarter of the eighteen century the heroic couplet seems a trick used by all, but used badly"
  • p.44 - "poetry in French reacted far more decisively than poetry in English to the early modernist war on devices"
  • p.59 - "Wimsatt says rhyme of the highest sort repeats just the final syllable or syllables of the last words that are semantically unalike"
  • p.78 - "Apparently rhymes are seamless only when the syntax leading up to them does not include effects of apposition or of parataxis or of interpolated parenthesis. The further back in the line or stanza one can trace the syntactic justification for a rhyme word, the easier it will be to afford the necessary slight shock of the unfamiliar"
  • p.88 - "More than any previous period's work, modern rhyme exemplifies all points on the range [from echolalia to multiple sense], including the extremes. So these examples suggest that the same modernity that officially denies the device may also, if with some violence, find its renewal indispensable"
  • P.98 - "As a language habit, rhyme seems a derangement, seems to say something only about language, but there is always the possibility that it is also telling us something also ourselves ... when we perceive that language, like nature in the scientists' estimation, is only partially organised, we regain incentive for basic discoveries. By boycotting puns and confining rhymes, English neoclassical poets wished to control this subversive likelihood of hidden perspectives within language and ourselves"
  From "The Chances of Rhyme", R.Wesling, Univ of California Press, 1980.
• the cause of rhyme's aesthetic effect is "unexpectedness of the specific sequences of sounds, based on a deviation from stochastic distribution" - Jiri Levy, "The Meanings of Form and the Forms of Meaning", Poetics-Poetyka-Poetika II.
• "When the comforting echo of rhyme is removed, success or failure in the choice of words, in the sentence structure, in the order, is at once more apparent ... Freed from its exacting task of supporting lame verse, it could be applied with greater effect where most needed", "To Criticize the Critic", T.S. Eliot, Farrer, Straus & Giroux, 1965
• "for three hundred years, apart from a few unconvincing attempts at analogies with music, rhyme was always viewed metrically" - "Semantic Rhyme: A Reappraisal", McKie, M., Essays in Criticism, XLVI;4, 1996,p.356
• Rhyme "is the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre" - Oscar Wilde
• • p.9 - rhyme "a thing trivial ... of no true musical delight" - Milton.
  • p.10, p.93 - "rhyme is essentially a kind of stress ... a reinforcement of rhythm"
  From "The Art of the Rhyme", BJ Pendlebury, Chatto & Windus, 1971
• • p.96 - "the need for rhyme makes a writer mix in the mind registers and topic fields in an unpredictable way and this enables surprising and imaginative expressions to be developed which will be enhanced if the rhyme also contributes as it should to the sonic structure of the poem"
  • p.98 - "Rhyme, allied to metre and rhythm, may be regarded as an external constraint upon the writer, imposed by conventions a reader shares. These conventions form a contract between them, constitute a 'game' they both play.... While this contract presents many obligations it also has some benefits. For example, a poor rhyme is not necessarily seen as a dereliction on the poet's part but as an inevitable result of an intractability in the language and the rhyming contract entered into"
  From "An Introduction to Rhyme", Peter Dale, Agenda/Bellew, 1998
• "Near rhymes can thus suggest a possible full rhyme that is not there, and yet is there as a ghost". Quoting
  Lying so close, they catch the sun,
  the spokes directed at the shin.
  from "Wading at Wellfleet" by Elizabeth Bishop, she notes the importance of the ghost rhymes "sin" and "shun" - "Against Coercion - Games Poets Play", Eleanor Cook, Stanford UP, 1998, p.224
• Rhyme "provides the condensed formula of poetic language: identity and variation, obligatoriness and freedom, sound and meaning, unity and plurality, texture and structure", "Poetic and Non-Poetic Language", Edward Stankiewicz (in 'Poetics-Poetyka-Poetika I', ed. Donald Davie et al, 1961), p.16

Voice (back to top)

• "As soon as / I speak, I / speaks", Robert Creeley, "The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley", p.294
• "In those poems that change me the speaker is most often the protagonist, not the narrator. The narrator knows he will survive the poem. The protagonist never knows if he will even make it to the end; the poem itself becomes the act of survival", Jorie Graham, in "Singular Voices" (ed Stephen Berg), p.93
• "The work of art in its complete purity implies the disappearance of the poet's oratorical presence. The poet leaves the initiative to the words. The words ignite through mutual reflexes like a flash of fire over jewels. Such reflexes replace that respiration [of the poet] perceptible in the old lyrical aspiration or the enthusiastic personal direction of the sentence", Mallarme, Crise de vers, p.366
• a dialogue develops between the person who wrote the first line and the other, who goes on writing. (Paz, in "Seven Voices", Rita Guibert, 1973)
• "When we open a first volume of verse these days, we listen to hear a distinctive voice, if we can, and if the voice is not already somewhat differentiated from its precursors and its fellows, then we tend to stop listening, no matter what the voice is attempting to say", "The Anxiety of Influence" (2nd edition), H.Bloom, OUP, 1997, p.148.
• "in order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it", Machado
• "the singularity of modern poetry does not come from the ideas or attitudes of a poet, it comes from his voice", "The Other Voice", Octavia Paz, Carcanet, 1992, p.153.
• • p.ix - "En somme, le Langage issu de la Voix, plutot que la Voix du Langage", XXII, 425-6.
  • p.xvi - "What if the unifying action of the voice itself is taken as the 'meaning' of a poem, however?"
  From "Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice", C. Crow, CUP, 1982

The Lyrical I (back to top)

• "The whole question of who is speaking to whom is crucial to all of lyric poetry", Willard Spiegelman, in "Jorie Graham", Thomas Gardner (ed), Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2005, p.237
• "I saw the lyric voice as one of the tools used to further the ends of colonialism", p.202, N. NourbeSe Philip in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003
• "The poem simulates a lyrical I whose ghostliness scares away the old hermeneutic attitudes that, having become second nature, have attached themselves to the aftermath of tradition", Anselm Haverkamp, "Poetic Contruction and Hermeneutic Tradition"
• "Who was this 'I' speaking? What was speaking me? How far did the illusion of selfhood, that most intimate and precious possession, reach? How could the lie of culture be broken up if the lie of the self made by that culture remained intact?", Wendy Mulford, "The Redstockings Manifesto", p.31
• "The empirical 'I' is quietened in the act of attention required to write a poem in the first place. ... In the emptying out of the self something is glimpsed that can't be emptied out", Kevin Hart, Salt 10, p.261

Visual Layout (back to top)

• "As poetry moved slowly off the tongue and onto the page, the visual appeal of an approximately square field on a sheet of white paper must have been impossible to resist", Don Patterson, "101 Sonnets", Faber, 1999, p.xvi
• "The change of the recording medium from human memory to scroll then book has 1) reduced impersonality of tone (no longer is there much collective re-editing) 2) increased imagery and descriptive passages (no longer is there a need to hold a crowd's attention) 3) increased the amount of the work that's immediately available - Short Term Memory (STM) can rapidly be topped up." - "The Poetics of the Mind's Eye", C Collins, Univ of Pennsylvania, 1991, p.9
• all arts in the twentieth century "have been hunted back to their mediums and there have been isolated, concentrated and defined. It is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself. To restore the identity of an art the opacity of its medium must be emphasized", Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon"
• "This frame reinforces the impression that every poem aspires to a rectilinear condition, the shape of a mirror or a window... in our unconscious desire to locate the presence of the poet behind the frame of the words, we try to animate the poem itself ... and the poem itself seems to be returning our attention", "Wallflowers", Michael Donaghy, The Poetry Society, 1999.
• "The poetic text with its general striving toward maximal ordering implies the presumption of the graphic ordering of the text ... Just as the oral existence of a belletristic text is regulated by its performance (declamation), a written text must have appropriate signs of organisation. The graphic system performs this role", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.71

Genre (back to top)

• • "The functional and the structural genres of a text cooperate to allow innovation, by leaving a reader with ground to stand on while he or she learns to understand the meaning of the unfamiliar" - p.77
  • "the genre competence of an experienced reader is both nimble and creative, and has both historical types and ahistorical types available for use and adaption... The addition and deletion of conditions and the redefinition of terms within conditions do not threaten the stability of the system, which by its nature not only accommodates but welcomes change" - p.82
  From "The Bounds of Interpretation", Schauber and Spolsky, Stanford University Press, 1986.
• "All understanding of verbal meaning is necessarily genre-bound", E. D. Hirsch, "Validity in Interpetation", (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965): 76.
• "communication is impossible without the agreed codes of genre" - "A history of English literature", Fowler, 1989, p.216.
• "genres are agents of ideological closure - they limit the meaning-potential of a given text" - John Hartley in "Cultural Studies", O'Sullivan et al., Routledge, 1994, p.128.
• "The effect which many identify with the Postmodern is produced by defeating readers' generic expectations." - Thomas O. Beebee, "The Ideology of Genre".

Symbol/Myth/Allegory/Fantasy (back to top)

• "Rather than imagine art as a window on the world, allegory tries to examine the models of judgement that form the window", Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, CUP, 1989, p.48
• "An allegory is an extended analogy, arranged in narrative, in which nonhuman objects are personified and in which label-names are employed. It is to be distinguished from a roman à clef in that the latter is a similar analogy but one in which there is a human parallel for human persons and events", ???, p.68
• "Deprived of a God to allude to, we seek allegories everywhere ... And as a result we are losing the gift for identifying the symbolic mode ... Where everything has a second sense, everything is irredeemably flat and dull ... We no longer even know how to enjoy the revelation of the literal, the sense of amazement at that which is, when the maximum of polyvalence coincides with the minimum of tautology: 'a rose is a rose is a rose.'", "on literature", Umberto Eco, Secker & Warburg, 2005, p. 159-60.
• "It is a big difference whether the poet looks for the particular in the general or whether he sees the general in the particular. The former produces allegory, where the particular has validity only as an example of the general; the latter, however, is the actual nature of poetry; it expresses the particular without thinking of the general or without pointing at it. He who grasps this particular vividly gets the general with it at the same time without being aware of it, or only late." - J.W. Goethe, "Werke", Hamburger Ausgabe, Munich:C.H. Beck, 1973, vol. 12, pp. 470-71.
• the distinction between symbol and allegory is "between a 'concrete' approach to symbols which begins with images of actual things and works outward to ideas and propositions, and 'abstract' approach which begins with the idea and then tries to find concrete images to represent it." - Northrop Frye, "Anatomy of Criticism"
• "[symbolism is] where the symbol is founded on an intimate unity between the image that rises up before the senses and the supersensory totality that the image suggests [whereas allegory] designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin [referring] to a meaning that it does not itself constitute", Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality"
• "A fundamental distinction between symbolism and allegory is, perhaps, that the relationship between the symbol and whatever it symbolizes is a natural one, while in allegory the relationship of a sign and what it signifies is arbitrary", Robert Pack, "Wallace Stevens", Gordian Press, 1958, p.193
• "What is characteristic of myth? To transform a meaning into form. In other words, myth is always a language robbery", Barthes, "Myth Today"
• "If SF is the literature of change, then fantasy is the literature of longing ... Fantasy often ends with the reestablishment of order, with evil conquered and good on the throne. SF often ends with the establishment of a new order, a new way of doing things, with the evolution to a higher order.", Treitel
• fantasy is "a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. it is not anti-rational, but para-rational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic; a heightening of reality", Le Guin, "The Language of the Night", 1992, p.79
• "A work of fantasy compels a reader into a metaphorical state of mind. a work of realism, on the other hand, permits very literal-minded readings...Even worse, it is possible to read a realistic book as though it were not fiction at all", Jill Paton Walsh
• "the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history... Children as a class neither like fairy-stories more nor understand them better than adults do", Tolkein, Tree and Leaf
• "By literalizing the allegory of Nineteen Eighty-Four, [Angus] Wilson ironically deciphers its encoded anti-totalitarian stance formulated in the wake of Fascist ascendancy. This effectively thwarts the naive representational reading that would translate and reduce the bizarre surfaces of the novel into the commonplace predictability of a historically verifiable 'reality'. The text betrays a profound self-consciousness about the reception which awaits it; whereby postwar reading for realism refuses to acknowledge anti-realist fantasy on its own terms, but must convert it into fantasy 'about' something else", Marina Mackay, in Pretext: Volume 1, (eds Bell and Magrs), 1999

Quality (back to top)

• "The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is - what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used", C.S.Lewis, "A preface to Paradise Lost", 1942, p.1
• "good poems, i.e., those that bear poetic information, are poems in which all of the elements are simultaneously both expected and unexpected. Violation of the first principle makes the text senseless; violation of the second renders it trivial", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.123
• The traditional C18 view was that "poetry is truth which has been ornamented by fiction and figures in order to delight and move the reader; the representation of truth, and nothing but the truth, is non-poetry; the use of deception or inappropriate ornaments is bad poetry ... To Wordsworthians poetry is the overflow or expression of feeling in an integral and naturally figurative language; the representation of face unmodified by feeling is non-poetry; the simulation or conventional expression of feeling is bad poetry", MH Abrams, "The mirror and the lamp", OUP, 1953, p.298
• "To Plato, poetry had been bad because it aroused the emotions, and to Aristotle, poetry (or at least tragedy) had been good because it purged the emotions. To the Wordsworthians, poetry, because it strengthens and refines the emotions, is among the greatest of goods", MH Abrams, "The mirror and the lamp", OUP, 1953, p.331
• "It is now plain that any debate over who is, or is not, a better writer, or what is, or is not, a more legitimate writing is, for the most part, a surrogate social struggle. The more pertinent questions are what is the community being addressed in the writing, how does the writing participate in the constitution of this audience, and is it effective in doing so", Silliman, "In the American Tree", p.xxi
• "The concepts of quality and value - and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself - are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theatre", Fried, "Art and Objecthood" (in 'Minimal Art: a Critical Anthology' ed Battcock), p.142
• "Criticism about the novel is not so obsessed with the question of value, probably because the world of fiction is market led: If a book sells well, it is almost by definition (particularly in the current climate of cultural studies) 'valuable' and therefore worthy of study. The market has taken over the evaluative role of the critic but poetry does not generate so much money or interest. Its audience is smaller, a tight-knit community; its authorities are correspondingly more powerful", Vicki Bertram, in "Contemporary British Poetry", eds Acheson and Huk, State univ of NY Press, 1996, p.284
• "multitude of causes, unknown to former times, now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind ... The most effective of these causes are the great national events taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of the occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies", Wordsworth, Preface in Lyrical Ballads, 1802.
• "Most people writing poetry are better employed keeping rabbits" - Edith Sitwell
• "In a country in love with amateurs, in a country where the incompetent have such beautiful manners and personalities so fragile and charming that one cannot bear to injure their feelings by the introduction of competent criticism" - Pound, 1914
• "The language of Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare has now become so antiquated and obsolete that most readers of our age have no ear for them. Poetry has become much more polished and refined since", Edward Bysshe, 1702
• "A sleeping nation has wakened to the realization that there is money to be made out of chopping its prose into bits. Something must be done shortly if the nation is to be saved from this menace. But what? ... . Probably the only hope lies in the fact that poets never buy other poets' stuff. When once we have all become poets, the sale of verse will cease or be limited to the few copies which individual poets will buy to give to their friends.", PG Wodehouse, "The Alarming Spread of Poetry", The Uncollected Wodehouse
• "I see an awful lot of poems in quarterlies that prefer boredom to risk. Writing a well-wrought poem of careful irony and shades of alienated indifference or mild self- pity comes as easily now as rhymed quatrains about meadowlarks and nightingales to an earlier generation who looked out the window and like us, saw pigeons.", Marge Piercy, 1992
• "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.", Oscar Wilde
• "one cannot review a bad book without showing off", Auden
• "No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing" - T.S. Eliot, 1933.
• "Now all these glaring improprieties of language may be traced back to one common root - the pursuit of novelty in thought. It is this that has turned the brain of nearly all the learned world of today", "On the sublime", (pseudo)Longinus (V),
• In "Companion Encyclopedia of the History of and Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences", I. Grattan-Guinness, Routledge 1994), "Birkhoff provided a quantitative measure of phonetic syzygy [a measure of poetic quality] in an 'aesthetic formula' M = (aa + 2r + 2m - 2ae - 2ce)/c. To 2 decimal places, 'Kubla Khan' comes out at 0.83 and 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' at 0.51." The Encyclopedia doesn't go into what a, r, m, e or c represent. To find out more, get "Aesthetic Measure", G. D. Birkoff, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933.
• "The greatest literature operates, in other words, morally as well as verbally between two poles: dramatises the tension between the social check and the individual desire", P. Hobsbaum, "Theory of Criticism", Indiana University Press, 1970, p.221

Criticism (back to top)

• "real critical judgment is dialectical; it proceeds not just from rule to example, but also from example to rule", Adam Kirsch, "The Modern Element", W.W.Norton, 2008, p.318
• "I desire the merging of poetic activity with criticism, at the most deeply personal level, rather than their dissociation through analysis", Yves Bonnefoy, "The Lure and the Truth of Poetry", (preface)
• "Criticism must be transcendental, that is, much consider literature ephemeral & easily entertain the supposition of its entire disappearance", Emerson, "",
• "critics and reviewers ... cannot give what the author, the artist, so foolishly looks for - imaginative and original judgement. What they can do, and what they do very well, is to tell the writer how the book or play accords with current patterns of feeling and thinking", Doris Lessing, "the golden notebook" (Preface), Flamingo, 1972, p.16
• "criticism must consider both what is physically present in a text and, no less importantly, what is missing in terms of the reader's system of expectations.", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.xi
• "A 'juridicial' critical discourse on such writers is still appropriate in the periodicals, measuring how far particular literary products violate or conform to certain aesthetic-ideological norms; but this discourse must be conducted at a distance from the market, and it is the market, not critical discourse, which has the upper hand in determining what is acceptable", "The Function of Criticism", T. Eagleton, Verso, 1984, p.57.
• "I think that the English departments have made it possible to have a career teaching English without caring much about literature or knowing much about literature but just producing rather trite, formulaic, politicized readings of this or that text. This makes it an easy target. There's a kind of formulaic leftist rhetoric that's been developed in the wake of Foucault, which permits you to exercise a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion on anything from the phonebook to Proust. It's sort of an obviously easy way to write books, articles, and it produces work of very low intellectual quality. And so, this makes this kind of thing an easy target from the outside.", Rorty, interview in The Dualist, 2, 1995, pp. 56-71
• "Empiricist common sense [urges] that the risk task of the critic is to get on with the reading process, to respond directly to the text without worrying about niceties of theory, as if ... the lack of any systematic approach or procedure ... were a guarantee of objectivity.", Catherine Belsey, "Critical Practice", Routledge, 1980, p.2
• "if it is indeed the case that people approach literature with the desire to learn something about the world, and if it is indeed the case that the literary medium is not transparent, then a study of its non-transparency is crucial in order to deal with the desire one has to know something about the world by reading literature", Salusinszky, "Criticism in Society", Methuen, 1987, p.166
• "We appreciate most works in part, some in so far as they correspond to our own predilections, others to the extent that we can recreate them in our own terms. But this is not the way in which we appreciate a masterpiece", P. Hobsbaum, "Theory of Criticism", Indiana University Press, 1970, p.30
• "[Criticism] might contribute in a modest way to our very survival", "Walter Benjamin: or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism", T.Eagleton, NLB, 1981,p.124
• "[G. Wilson] Knight saw that his method had an analogy in physics and that he had replaced "character" and all such "rigid particles" by a field theory.... It is hard to think of a more important development for modern criticism than this change from particle to field theory, " "Beyond Formalism", G.H. Hartman, Yale University Press, 1970, p.12
• "I think it is totally wrong if writers review each other's books... I find that idiotic, Truly idiotic", W.G.Sebald, Pretext 7, 2003, p.22

Movements (back to top)

• Romanticism
  • "[Romanticism is] that attempt, apparently doomed to failure and abandoned by our time, to identify subject and object, to reconcile man and nature", Rene Wellek, in "Romanticism reconsidered" (ed Northrop Frye), 1963, p.133
  • "Romanticism is rooted in torment and unhappiness and, at the end of the eighteenth century, the German-speaking countries were the most tormented in Europe", Hauser, "A Social History of Art", V3, p.166
  • "The whole exuberance, anarchy and violence of modern art ... its unrestrained, unsparing exhibitionism, is derived from [Romanticism]. And this subjective, egocentric attitude has become so much a matter of course for us ... that we find it impossible to reproduce even an abstract train of thought without talking about our own feelings", Hauser, "A Social History of Art", V3, p.174
• Surrealism
  • "Surrealism has undertaken to realize, through an artistic movement, the spiritual intentions of Dadaism", Huelsenbeck, "Courier dada", 1958, p.72
• Expressionism
  • "Expressionism still exists in Germany, and every avant-garde tendency in Germany even today, is still infected with that old expressionism...Here [in England] it is most people's ambition to write a readable novel", W.G. Sebald, Pretext 7, 2003, p.24
• Symbolism
  • "The literary history of our time is to a great extent that of the development of Symbolism and its fusion or conflict with Naturalism", Edmund Wilson, "Axel's Castle", 1953, p.25
  • "Symbolist practice had three main aspects: first, the poem as a whole constituted the symbol ... not symbols in the poem; second, the 'vagueness' that was thought to be a musical analogue ... ; third, juxtaposition of elements with transitional links suppressed, In England and America, most Modernists were interested mainly in the third aspect", David Rollow, PN Review, V33, n.6, p.33
  • "Imagisme is not symbolism. The symbolists dealt in 'association', that is, in a sort of allusion, almost of allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status of a word ... The Image is the poet's pigment ... The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech.", Ezra Pound, "Gaudier-Brzeska", p.97,99,102.
  • "Symbolist poetry ... applied to the extensive poem the aesthetics of the short poem", "The Other Voice", Octavia Paz, Carcanet, 1992, p.26.
  • "I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man use 'symbols' he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk", Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect," in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound
  • "What is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation. Its artistic worth is measurable by the degree to which it remains, after interpretation, vital - no interpretation or cardiopulmonary push-pull can exhaust or empty it", Donald Barthelme, "Not-Knowing"
• Realism
  • the "calculated demolition of the conventions of 'the' novel is a thrust into reality rather than a retreat into literature", Ronald Sukenick, in "Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow", ed. Raymond Federman, Swallow Press, 1975, p.40.
  • • p.70 - Classic realism is 'illusionism', 'closure' plus a 'hierarchy of discourses which establishes the "truth" of the story',
    • p.82 - "Classic realism cannot foreground contradiction"
    From "Critical Practice", Catherine Belsey, Methuen, 1980
  • • p.281 - "poetic realism is not incompatible with 'symbolic discourse' since in poetry the most concrete image tends to assume symbolic connotations"
    • p.284 - "'art of process' ... is naturalistic not in the sense of imitating nature, but of wanting art to be nature."
    From "The Truth of Poetry", M.Hamburger, Metheun, 1982.
  • "It is reasonable to presuppose that author, text and reader are closely interconnected in a relationship that is to be conceived as an ongoing process that produces something that had not existed before. ... Since the advent of the modern world there is a clearly discernable tendency toward privileging the performative aspect of the author-text-reader relationship. ... Closed systems, such as the cosmos of Greek thought or of the medieval world picture, gave priority to representation as mimesis because of their overriding concern that whatever existed - even if it eluded perception - should be translated into something tangible. When the closed system, however, is punctured and replaced by open-endedness, the mimetic component of representation declines ... The process then no longer entails reaching behind appearances in order to grasp an intelligible world in the Platonic senses, but turns into a 'way of world-making'." - Wolfgang Iser, "The Play of the Text" in "Realism", L.R. Furst (ed), Longman, 1992. p.206
  • "Realism is essentially the democratic art", Gustave Courbet, 1861.
  • "Language is a form, it cannot possibly be either realistic or unrealistic.", Barthes, " Myth Today"
• Formalism
  • formalism is "a method ... of revealing the human content of art by a study of its formal properties", Geoffrey Hartman, "Beyond Formalism", Yale Univ Press, 1970, p.42
• Oulipo
  • "By 'working under constraint' they have raised their level of consciousness because - their dictum - if an author does not define his or her constraint, the constraint will in turn define their work for them", "Memory and Oulipian Constraints", Peter Consenstein, Postmodern Culture v.6 n.1 (September, 1995)
  • "in Queneau's and Le Lionnais's view, after the exhaustion of the generative power of traditional constraints, only mathematics could offer a way out between a nostalgic obstinacy with worn-out modes of expression and an intellectually pathetic belief in 'total freedom'" - p.40, "Oulipo Compendium", Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie (eds), Atlas Press 1998
  • "An oulipian writer is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape", Queneau
  • "Oulipo: the continuation of literature by other means" (after Clausewitz)
• Hermeneutics
  • hermeneutics is traditionally concerned with "the question of what is involved in the event of understanding a text, and the question of what understanding itself is", Palmer, "Hermeneutics: Interpretational Theory in Schleiermaher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer", p.10
• New Criticism
  • "the New Critical valorization of the lyric as the dominant poetic form is due in part to the fact that the lyric, which can relatively easily be understood as a free-standing verbal object, is teachable in a class", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.15
  • "The New Critical distrust of emotion in poetry may be seen to emerge partly from its perceived function as a teaching method and partly from its emphasis on the objective nature of the poem", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.75
  • "New Criticism has a tendency to endow aesthetic form with moral and cultural significance", ???
  • "The New Critics never fully succeeded in theorizing the relationship between the poem made of words, the verbal icon, and the language within which it exists and signifies....They consistently urged that there was no distinction between form and content, that texts cannot be understood as ideas wrapped in emotions, or meanings decorated with imagery", Catherine Belsey, "Critical Practice", Routledge, 1980, p.17
  • "cutting itself off from all discourse except the poetic, it increasingly isolated literary criticism from all other concerns.", Catherine Belsey, "Critical Practice", Routledge, 1980, p.20
• Structuralism
  • "structuralism is not particularly interested in meaning per se, but rather in attempting to describe and understand the conventions and modes of signification which make it possible to 'mean'", "Modern Literary Theory (3rd Edition)", Rice and Waugh, Arnold, 1996, p.22.
  • "Structuralism ... starts off from the observation that every concept in a given system is determined by all other concepts of the system and has no significance by itself alone ... there is an interrelation between the data (facts) and the philosophical assumptions, not a unilateral dependence", Garvin, "a Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style", vi
  • "The failure of the structuralist program is pretty much a matter of history. Attempts to treat literature as if it had the structure of a language ... or to see literary structures as the result of basic structures of human thought, or to causally link differences in languages with incommensurable differences in modes of conceptualizing the world either failed to be convincing or proved trivial. Although the promise of structuralism was exaggerated, the intellectual investment of quite a few critics was too heavy for it to be abandoned without a struggle. The claims of structuralism therefore underwent a process of increasing moderation", "Literary Meaning", W.V. Harris, Macmillan, 1996, p.76.
  • "Structuralist Analysis typically searches for hierarchical strings of binary oppositions" - "Studying Literature", Goring, Hawthorn and Mitchell, Arnold, 2001
• Post-Structuralism
  • "In retrospect, it seems clear that the era of poststructuralism was characterized by a decisive intensification of attention to the process (rather than the product) of interpretation", Jeffrey T. Nealon , "The Swerve around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation", Postmodern Culture V17.3, 2007
  • "In the classical, Aristotelian view, experience is a doorway to the apprehension of essence; experience is understood as a real and immediate presence and therefore as a reliable means of knowing. In the Post-Structuralist Althusserian view, experience is a product of ideology. It is a sign mediated by other signs" ... "empirical facts are always ideological productions", Diana Fuss, "Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference", Routledge, 1980, p.114
  • "This is a descriptive title that is sometimes used almost interchangeably with deconstruction while at other times being seen as a more general, umbrella term", "Studying Literature", Goring, Hawthorn and Mitchell, Arnold, 2001, p.169
  • "For some [Post-Structuralism] is a matter of a more radical reading of Saussure, for others it is the moment at which Structuralism becomes self-reflective. It is sometimes taken as a critique of Structuralism, sometimes a development of it. [...] If one wanted to date the appearance of Post-Structuralism then 1966/7 would be a reasonable place to start [...] The moment of Structuralism and the moment of Post-Structuralism almost coincide in terms of their appearance and adoption in Anglo-American literary theory. [...] if the categories of literature and literary studies do not refer to things-in-themselves, but are constructed in difference then the act of criticism which articulates that difference cannot be viewed as subordinate. Rather, it is of equal importance to the literature it studies", "Modern Literary Theory (3rd Edition)", Rice and Waugh, Arnold, 1996, p.114-5.
• Deconstructionism
  • "deconstruction is undoubtedly anarchic", Derrida, ", Negociations", p.22
  • "Deconstruction is not a method of anything, or a philosophy of anything. Deconstruction is a response to a text that bears in mind the 'other' which the text excludes or covers up... It can come in any form that is suitable to the text to which it is responding... Jacques Derrida deconstructs works of philosophy in a philosophical style: Angela Carter deconstructs stories in a narrative style...Deconstruction objects to purity and closed-off stories...Deconstruction is a way of worrying about limits and borders between things (the world, philosophy, fiction, politics, gender), including worrying about its own borders and practices", Robert Eagleton, in "Contemporary British Fiction", Lane et al, Polity Press, 2003, p.202
  • "Deconstruction measures language which itself opens into an infinitude, each word in its connection with other words forming images, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, settings, characters, ideas ....Each of these fractal in themselves; a scene opening to color, memory .... What is unmeasurable within one opening is measurable in another; what is measurable through one opening itself opens up to what is no longer measurable", "Mots d'order", J. Natoli, State Univ of New York Press, 1992. p.62.
  • "deconstruction ... gave a new source of commentary to a field that seemed to have pretty well exhausted what there was to say about literature" "deconstruction opened a wholly new field by concentrating on [literary texts'] contradictions.. Moreover, the goal of commentary could be shifted from demonstration of a thesis to the exhibition of intellectual play.", "Literary Meaning", W.V. Harris, Macmillan, 1996, p.66.
  • "Deconstruction's dual sensibility, at once stoically conformed to the ineluctability of metaphysics and enraptured by a jouissance or mise-en-abyme which promises to shatter that whole enclosure, has doubtless a particular historical source: it mixes the left pessimism of the post-1968 period with a discourse which continues, as it were, to keep the revolution warm.", "The Function of Criticism", T. Eagleton, Verso, 1984, p.99.
  • "[Deconstruction] is able to outflank every existing knowledge to absolutely no effect", "Walter Benjamin: or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism", T.Eagleton, NLB, 1981, p.103.
  • "Deconstruction is a strategy for revealing the underlayers of meanings 'in' a text that were suppressed or assumed in order for it to take its actual form ... Texts are never simply unitary but include resources that run counter to their assertions and/or their authors' intentions", "Introducing Postmodernism", Appignanesi and Garratt, Icon Books, 1999, p.80
• Modernism
  • "[Milosz] convinces us that modernism was not actually modern, but the necessary conclusion of four centuries of art and thought about art: it was the desperate attempt to make art alone a sufficient source of value ... Only what came afterward - the postmodern - is really new ... The question for us, which we have yet to answer and seldom even ask properly, is whether the postmodern will mean the dawning of nihilism or of a new, transformed humanism", Adam Kirsch, "The Modern Element", W.W.Norton, 2008, p.222
  • "What the theorists of modernism and postmodernism have done is to encourage poetry that needs justification, critical props, excuses for the wilfulness of self-indulgent individuals - as if most needed any further excuse", Peter Forbes, "Poetry Review", Spring 1996, p.3
  • "Modernist poetry, so keen to be difficult and to problemize the reader's reactions, develops out of and is at one with institutional acacdemia. If The Waste Land is in important ways the product of the Harvard elective system, and if The Cantos are lecture notes write large ...", Robert Crawford, "The Modern Poet", OUP, 2001, p.197
  • "The family had been absent from most modernist poetry", Robert Crawford, "The Modern Poet", OUP, 2001, p.239
  • "A tendency towards anti-poetry is inseparable from almost every variety of twentieth-century modernism", Michael Hamburger, "The Truth of Poetry", Carcanet, 1982, p.234
  • "For many decades Cambridge has been a focus in English poetry of a kind of metaphysical modernism ... a serious and total commitment to poetry as the supreme record of the transaction between self and the world", Peter Riley, "Reality Studios V8.4, 1986"
  • "Unlike their distinguished predecessors, the German and English romantics of the early nineteenth century, the modernists have not sustained hope in the possibility of unifying subject with object or human being with nature", Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism, Harvard Univ Press, 1992, p.37
  • "Drawing so strongly on both anthropology and dialect and aiming to outflank the Anglo-centricity of established Englishness through a combination of the demotic and the multicultural, Modernism was essentially provincial phenomenum", Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature, OUP, 1992, p.270
  • "Modernity is that which is ephemeral, fugitive, contingent upon the occasion; it is half of art, whose other half is eternal and unchangeable", "The Painter of Modern Life", Baudelaire, 1861
  • "The modern spirit was a combination of certain intellectual qualities inherited from the Enlightenment: lucidity, irony, scepticism, intellectual curiosity, combined with the passionate intensity and enhanced sensibility of the Romantics, their rebellion and the sense of technical experiment, their awareness of living in a tragic age", Cyril Connolly, "The Modern Movement", 1965
  • "In all the arts, however, modernism first manifests itself as an intensified aestheticism", Monroe K. Spears, "Dionysus and the City", OUP, 1970, p.58
  • "The drive toward form and then through it, to art and then beyond it and back to reality, truth, immediate experience; and the incorporation of this whole process into art - these are central to modernism", Monroe K. Spears, "Dionysus and the City", OUP, 1970, p.63
  • "The modernist assault on forms has, in all probability, no exact parallel in literary theory ... it challenges the idea of form itself and resolves that challenge by forcing new demands on every artistic medium", Ihab Hassan, "The Dismemberment of Orpheus", OUP, 1971, p.9
  • "Modernism is by no means the only movement whose ambitions led it, at times, to rage against everthing that make social life worth living ... The extreme ambition of what may be the purest Modernist work shares the same critical perspective as the apocalyptic conscious, but it lacks its [religious] consolations", Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, CUP, 1989, p.422
  • "In part, this Modernist poetics is a response to, and a short-circuiting of, the Romantic poetics of revolution and self-fashioning, for what is does is attempt to dispense altogether with the notions of selfhood, individuality and personality", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.55
  • "I would be tempted to define crucial aspects of modernity in terms of the drastic reduction of internal language and of the concommitant inflation of public verbalization, of 'publicity' in the full sense of the term", "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner, OUP, 1972, p.58
  • "Radical modernism in European poetry is, I believe, largely derived from Mallarmé's practice and from Heidegger's theoretic metaphor, and from the image of Müderlin in Heidegger", "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner, OUP, 1972, p.33
  • "For the Novel written in England modernism was never so much in opposition to realism as in fact instantiating a new realism, with detailed psychological description replacing external social observation", Steven Earnshaw, "Literature and Culture in Modern Britain", Bloom and Day (eds), Longman, 2000, p.64
  • modernism was driven by "a feeling that form and subject-matter are [or should be] structurally identical", Graves and Riding
  • • "through the modernist ballet, exploiting its unique combination of snob appeal, the magnetism of vogue ... and elite artistic status, the avant-garde broke out of its stockade", p.182
    • "'modernism' rested on the rejection of nineteenth-century bourgeois-liberal conventions in both society and art, and on the perceived need to create an art in some way suited to the technologically and socially revolutionary twentieth century", p.515
    • "in the first half of the century 'modernism' worked, the feebleness of its theoretical foundations unnoticed, the short distance to the limits of development permitted by its formulas ... not yet quite traversed... Formal avant-garde innovation and social hope were still welded together by the experience of world war ...", p.515
    • "The equivalent of 'modernism' in chess, the so-called 'hyper-modern' school of players of the 1920s ... did not propose to change the rules of the game, as did some. They merely reacted against convention ... by exploiting paradox - choosing unconventional openings ... and observing rather than occupying the centre. Most writers, and certainly most poets, in practise did the same", p.518
    From "Age of Extremes", Eric Hobsbaum, 1995, Abacus
• Post-modernism
  • ""Postmodernism" generally names the disorganisation of the cultural field since the 1970s", Vincent B. Leitch, "Living with Theory", Blackwell, 2008, p.105
  • "[Postmodern writing] turns out to be mimetic after all, but this imitation of reality is accomplished not so much at the level of its content, which is often manifestly un- or anti-realistic, as at the level of form", Brian McHale, "Postmodern Fiction", Metheun, 1987, p.38
  • "[postmodernism is] an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place", Jameson, "Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", Duke Univ Press, 1991, p.ix
  • "postmodernism fiction simply carries to its logical and questionable extremes the antirationalist, antirealist, antibourgeois program of modernism, but with neither a solid adversary (the bougeois having now everywhere co-opted the trappings of modernism and turned its defiant principles into mass media kitsch) nor solid moorings in the quotidian realism it defines itself against", Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment", 1980
  • "postmodernism springs in large part from the rout of modern Marxism",Terry Eagleton, "London Review of Books", 21st June, 2007, p.13
  • "quaint being the exact word for postmodern conceptions of nonreferential extremity", p.340, David Marriot in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003
  • "a great deal of contemporary American poetry (the postmodern, rather than traditional poetry) is much more closely linked to English Romantic literature than is usually acknowledged", Lyn Hejinian, (letter to Alison Mark), 1995
  • "[in postmodernism] instead of being rejected, conventions are actually embraced and exaggerated", Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism, Harvard Univ Press, 1992, p.30
  • "Romantic or quasi-romantic elements are, in fact, rather prominent in many classic works of the 'high modernist' period ... But if we turn to many of the aesthetic works and ideologies associated with the term postmodernism, ... the lingering vestiges of romanticism seem to have been banished almost entirely", Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism, Harvard Univ Press, 1992, 343-344
  • "even the postmodernists don't really understand one another's writing and make their way through the text by moving from one familiar name or notion to the next like a frog jumping across a murky pond by way of lily pads", Katha Pollitt, The Nation (10th June) 1966
  • "No one model for Postmodernist poetry prevails today. Instead, two radically opposed models (with several variants) compete for hegemony. The first takes the basic demand on contemporary poetry to be continuing the ideals of avant-garde experiment, but adjusting them to meet the social and epistemological conditions that contemporaneity imposes. The second insists on a conservative faith that poetry best addresses its society by relying on fairly constant ideals of lyrical expression. Ironically, each of these perspectives bases its appeal on claims that it can liberate us from what prove to be almost the same set of 'Modernist errors' ..
    modernist poetry negates a vital sense of life, because of excessive formalism
    The modes of presenting human agency become severely problematic
    The conjunction of impersonality with the imperative to formal autonomy severely reduces the social and psychological powers that can be claimed for poetry
    The ultimate sign of the Modernist failure is the conservative political sympathies that so many Modernist poets adopted late in their careers
    ", (p.380-383), Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, Charles Altieri, CUP, 1989
  • "post-modernism rejects originality and stresses the inevitability of appropriation in creative work. The prefix 'post' signals a foundational debt and an unabashedly reactive position that departs from a modernist make-it-new credo", Alice Fulton, in "The Measured Word", Kurt Brown (ed), Univ of Georgia Press, 2001, p.112
  • "where once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas for vocabularies", Lyn Hejinian, in "The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E book", p.29
  • "Lyotard's distinction rests upon the idea that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, ultimately draws its legitimacy from agreements made by participants in a language game... In this sense all knowledge is narrative knowledge, for all knowledge depends for its legitimacy upon values and beliefs constructed and confirmed by a process of telling, and so an active relationship between addressor and addressee", "Postmodernism and Performance", Nick Kaye, Macmillan, 1994, p.18
  • Jean Baudrillard has suggested that the acceleration of modernity has reached escape velocity from the gravitational pull of any grounding in reality or history - "The Year 2000 has Already happened"
  • • "I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse ... making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the Spirit", p.xxvii
    • "a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern", p.79
    From "The Postmodern Condition: a report on Knowledge", Lyotard, 1984
  • "I think that I offered the same alternative Stanley Fish did, and I think that Fish and I are basically saying the same thing: you can have the benefits of so-called European post-modern thought without the nonsense. You can have the benefits in plainer language. You can have what's good about them without the jargon and the complexity.", Rorty, interview in The Dualist 2, 1995, pp. 56-71
  • "In contrast to the isotropic space of modernism, postmodern space aims to be historically specific, rooted in cultural, often vernacular, style conventions, and often unpredictable in the relation of parts to the whole. In reaction to the large scale of the modern movement it attempts to create smaller units, seeks to break down a corporate society to urban villages, and maintain historical associations through renovation and recycling.", John A Agnew and James S. Duncan (eds). "The power of place". London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
  • "I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, 'I love you madly', because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say 'as Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.' At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence", Eco, "Postmodernisn, Irony, the Enjoyable"
  • "Postmodernism, in contrast [to modernism] tends to retain the relativism while abandoning the belief in the unified underlying reality", "Studying Literature", Goring, Hawthorn and Mitchell, Arnold, 2001, p.269
  • "Postmodernism writing requires a different ontological base-line from either social or psychological realism since it is the epistemological notion of reality which is at issue from the very outset ... Postmodern thought claims that the ability to represent reality is always compromised because reality is not 'out there' to be discovered and described, but is a construct of language and narration", Steven Earnshaw, "Literature and Culture in Modern Britain", Bloom and Day (eds), Longman, 2000, p.64-5
  • "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences", Jean-Francois Lyotard, "The Postmodern Condition", 1979
  • "by the early eighties the term has shifted from a description of a range of aesthetic practices involving playful irony, parody, parataxis, self-consciousness, fragmentation, to a use which encompasses a more general shift in thought and seems to register a pervasive loss of faith in the progressivist and speculative discourses of modernity. Postmodernism is now used to express the sense of a new cultural epoch in which distinctions between critical and functional knowledge break down as capitalism, in its latest consumerist phase, invades everything including the aesthetic, the post-colonial world and the unconscious, leaving no remaining oppositional space" - Patricia Waugh in "Postmodernism: A Reader", Edward Arnold, 1992
  • "the urge to identify and celebrate the category of the Postmodern has been so strong as to produce by back-formation a collective agreement about what modernism was, in order to have something to react against" - "Postmodern Culture: An introduction to Theories of the Contemporary", Connor, Blackwell, 1989
  • From "Chronoschisms", U.K. Heise, CUP, 1997
    • "Postmodernist culture and technology have systematically problematized the distinction between the public and the private not only through the emergence of new media and social realms such as television and the Internet, but also through sustained analyses of how this distinction can work not only to separate factually different social domains, but to perpetuate specific ideologies", p.37.
    • "But the [Postmodernist] narrative technique differs from that of high-modernist and late-modernist novels in two fundamental respects: the differing accounts or flashbacks are not linked to the voice or mind of any narrator or character configured with a view toward psychological realism, and they tell event sequences in contradictory and mutually exclusive versions", p.53.
    • "postmodernist repetition strategies seem designed precisely to preclude moments of epiphany and privileged insight ... The present is trapped in its own mutations", p.58.
• Objectivism
  • "Objectivism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the 'subject' and his soul", Charles Olson
• Language Poetry
  • "it is plausible to regard the return of irony as a demonstrable (if unintended) contribution of language writing to current American poetry", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.211
  • "A more pervasive assumption is that language poetry is passé, or else something to surmount", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.16.
  • "The legacy of language poetry has been disseminated into the environment of poetic innovation at large; and ... there's something about this legacy of innovation and women that go together", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.18.
  • "Language poetry draws on aspects of the French Oulipo schook with its structural games, and preoccupation with the making and breaking of new kinds of formal rule; as Oulipo evolved in conjunction with Tel Quel in France, so Language poetry (though many of the poets might deny this) has developed not just out of the French-influenced work of the early Ashbery but also alongside the growth of poststructuralism in US academia", Robert Crawford, "The Modern Poet", OUP, 2001, p.283
  • "Since ... Language writing successfully both created new readership networks and intervened in existing ones, their poetic critique of commodification carried considerable authority", p.133, Peter Middleton in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003
  • "The most impressive political work of that loosely affiliated group of recent American exploratory poets known as 'language poets' had less to do with the politics of the sign than it had to do with the on-the-ground labor of sustaining networks of presses, distributors, and readers", p.148, Keith Tuma in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003
  • "One of the cardinal principles - perhaps the cardinal principle - of American language poetics ... has been the dismissal of 'voice' as the foundational principle of lyric poetry", Perloff, Critical Inquiry 25, (1999), p.405
  • "The language writers operate within that tension between word without referent and word with direct referent", Ian Davidson, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, p.16
  • "[in language poetry] the attempt is not to articulate the curve of experience but to create a formal linguistic construct that itself shapes our perception of the world around us", Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect, CUP, 1985, p.230
  • "The idea that writing should (or could) be stripped of reference is as bothersome and confusing as the assumption that the primary function of words is to refer, one to one, to an already constructed world of things", Andrews and Bernstein, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, Southern Illinois UP, 1984, p.ix
• Hypertext
  • "Some say that by playing with hypertexts we escape two forms of oppression: having to follow sequences already decided on by others, and being condemned to the social division between those who write and those who read. This seems silly to me", "on literature", Umberto Eco, Secker & Warburg, 2005, p.10-11
  • "Hypertextual narrative has much to teach us about freedom and creativity. That is all well and good, but it is not everything. Stories that are 'already made' also teach us how to die.", "on literature", Umberto Eco, Secker & Warburg, 2005, p.15
  • With hypertext "The text becomes a present tense palimpsest where what shines through are not past versions but potential, alternate views.", Michael Joyce, "Of Two Minds: hypertext, Pedagogy and Poetics", Univ of Michigan Press, 1995.

Change/Avant-garde (back to top)

• "Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry", Jean-Paul Sartre
• "No avant-garde American poet accepts the ... thesis that a poem is an end in itself", Kenneth Rexroth, 1957
• "Futurism was the first avant-garde movement of the 20th century to move with ease, and to encourage such movement, between genres and media, and in that it set a pattern for other avant-gardes to come", AH Caesar and M Caesar, "Modern Italian Literature", Polity Press, 2007, p.145
• "as with experiment at any time, whatever fractious and discolating business was in the [] air became an influence", Richard Ford, "The Granta Book of the American Short Story", Granta, 1998, p. ix
• "Apart from the Black Arts Movement, the avant-garde has rarely been linked to pupularism, even when (as in the case of Dada) it's been resolutely anti-elitist", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.181
• "The avant-garde is launched by the bourgeoisie and is locked in a decaying orbit around it", Paul de Mann, "The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde", Indiana UP, 1991, p.81
• "The original notion of experimental literature as an avant-garde movement parallel to abstract visual art loses its general validity at the moment when this literary vanguardism was reduced to typographic and sound poems. The true counter-movement to conventional, descriptive use of language is based rather on the discovery that one can move in language as if in another world, without having to cling to connections, objective facts, and events", Heissenbuttel, quoted in "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", Salt, 2003, p.109
• "Any avant-garde activity is of course potentially a first exploration; but unless the terrain is subsequently inhabited, there is no reason to accredit an avant-garde with reconnaiassance as such", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.108
• "Innovation in poetry is less contested (or ignored) now, and this is largely attributable to both the number and variety of women", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.42.
• "the avant-garde is the force that ... has insistently tested democracy's boundaries, probing its exclusions, its willingness to shut out people who refuse to sign up to majority tastes and values ... it is the avant-garde, in all its uncomfortable strangeness, that helps protect democracy from one of its own worst enemies - itself", Caroline Levine, "TLS", Nov 16, 2007, p.17.
• "Simply to write in English in forms considered experimental by English or American standards cannot function as it does for those to whom the dominant language is the mother tongue; to do so it to affirm what they reject: that Standard English is always already the center to be decentred", p.262, Nancy Gish in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003
• "As long as an experimental writer whose signature is female aligns herself with the language poets, for example, ... she has a place on the literary map. The price she pays ... is twofold: the question of gender will be erased, declared a non-issue, and at the same time it is less likely than if her signature were male that she will become one of the stars", Marianne DeKoven, "Women's Review of Books" (4.2) 1986, p.13,
• "What kind of cultural work is a literary text doing? is a question that should be more frequently, and more complexly, asked of writers and critics of experimental writing", Caroline Bergvall in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 , p.353
• "Almost all readers can perceive that these innovative poems immediately incite a question: Is this really a poem?", Peter Middleton in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 , p.128
• "From the United States it can sometimes seem that the struggles of exploratory poetry in Britain today duplicate the struggles of "language poetry" ten of fifteen years ago", p.148, Keith Tuma in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003
• "If a single question can be said to have synchronised the American poetic avant-garde between 1970 and 1989, it was surely the question 'what is language?'", p.88, Steve Evans in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003
• "the argument against the viability of the avant-garde today rests on the assumption that there is no real resistance to the new, no stable norm from which the defiant artist may depart", David Lehman, "The Last Avant Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets", Anchor, 1999
• "If we are all postmodernists, we are none of us avant-garde, for postmodernism is the institutionalisation of the avant-garde", David Lehman, "The Last Avant Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets", Anchor, 1999, p.11
• "Born of the institutions of Imperial French culture, the avant-garde has ever since maintained a type of parasitic relationship with the dominant apparatuses of official taste and of moral and intellectual permission - even if this relationship fashions itself as an 'adversary relation'", Louis Armand, "The Avant-Garde in the Era of Post-Ideology", Louis Armand (ed.), "Litteraria Pragensia", 2006. p.6
• "[the avant-garde] gains its special status [through its critique of] the main body of the culture to which it is reacting", Roger Shattuck, "The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts", Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1984, p.74.
• "There was rapid transfer and interaction between different countries and different capitals, and the deep mode of the [early avant-garde], as in modernism, was precisely this mobility across frontiers", Raymond Williams, "The Politics of the Avant-Garde", 1989, p.59
• innovative writing is marked by two central concerns: 1) it "offers the perspective of the multiple 'I'" and, 2) it "recognizes the importance of the materials of writing to writing itself, an engagement with its medium", L.P. Glazier, "Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries", Univ of Alabama Press, 2002, p.22
• "Poetic revolutions are poetic performances motivated by a realization that the valence of marked/unmarked categories has reversed within the performative domain", Anthony Lombardy, "The New Formalist, V1.No. 1-2", p.79
• "It used sometimes to be argued that the next stage in the history of the novel was always an anti-novel, which in turn became the novel that had to be countered with another anti-novel. But this seems not to be true...there is a long history of avant-garde fiction which never ceases, as it should on this theory, to be avant-garde", Frank Kermode, "pieces of my mind", Allan Lane, 2003, p.315
• "Latter-day discussions of avant-garde, alternative, experimental, innovative or investigative cultural products generally are species of nostalgia.", David Kennedy, Jacket 26, 2005
• "The fact is that the British poetry scene is reactionary, nostalgic and prejudiced. The reputations of many of its star turns depend on an exclusivity that maintains an embargo on true diversity. Experimentalism is beyond the pale, as is pretty much anything that amounts to a conviction.", Gregory Woods, Magma, Autumn 2003
• "The poetic avant-garde sees the body of poetry as rotten and open to invasion; in fact, to clear the rot away is seen as a necessity. The avant-garde is aggressive, and there's no avoiding it, though it perceives itself as being ethical and necessary." - John Kinsella, "Spatial Relationships".
• "it is generally accepted that [the world of high culture, the elite arts, and, above all, the avant-garde] anticipated the actual breakdown of liberal-bourgeois society by several years", "Age of Extremes", Eric Hobsbaum, 1995, Abacus, p.178
• "A genuine avante-garde, it will be argued, needs a measure of unpopularity in order to consolidate its philosophical and economic independence from the culture from which it in turn borrows its formal effects. In even the best narrative art, that independence looks sorely stretched", "The Art of Today", Brandon Taylor, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995. p.168
• "a new literature requires new institutions, and these institutions are as much a part of its aesthetic as the literary works that they weave into the social fabric", Bernstein, "Provisional Institutions" (in Arizona Quarterly 51), p.144
• "the great changes in literature are non-literary in origin; and the same causes that produce the new work produce, in time, its audience. Wordsworth's poems did not produce Wordsworthians", Jarrell, "A Note on Poetry", 1940.
• "Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished", Wordsworth, "???", ???.
• "[Roy Fisher] maintains a dialogue of sorts with the habits he's trying to break - closure, epigram, consolation, 'realism' - which is of course rather an English way of proceeding", O'Brien, The Deregulated Muse, Bloodaxe, 1998, p. 122
• • p.30 - "Poetic Influence - when it involves two strong, authentic poets, - always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist."
  • p.68 - "It seems true that British poets swerve from their precursors, while the American poets labor rather to 'complete' their fathers."
  • p.148 - "If this book's argument is correct, then the covert subject of most poetry for the last three centuries has been the anxiety of influence, each poet's fear that no proper work remains for him to perform."
  • p.150 - "By the 1740's, at the latest, the anxiety of style and the comparatively recent anxiety of influence had begun a process of merging that seems to have culminated during our last few decades."
  From "The Anxiety of Influence" (2nd edition), H.Bloom, OUP, 1997
• "What does not change/is the will to change", Olson, "Kingfishers"
• "Each time a new stylistic mode introduces itself, the genre it arrives in goes slightly further into isolation. Whatever the discipline, modernisations take their art in one direction, outwards. ... Consequently, with each new movement there's less common ground between the genres to enable artists to migrate", ra page, "hyphen", Comma Press, 2003, p.ix
• • "Culler celebrates contemporary academic theory as a replacement for the (apparently extinct) literary avant-garde", p.33
  • "It has become a critical commonplace in recent years to proclaim the end of the avant-garde. According to Andrew Ross, Andreas Huyssen, and other theorists of postmodern culture, the lines between popular culture and avant-garde (high) culture and between mainstream and oppositional aesthetics have been blurred in all the arts...Postmodernism, they claim, revealed the 'high modernist dogma' of avant-gardism as fundamentally sterile and outmoded", p.55
  From "Poetic Culture", Christopher Beach, Northwest University Press, 1999
• "As a form of human behaviour, experimental writing clearly belongs with play: immature members of the group dress up in eccentric clothing, walk in eccentric ways (on one foot, for example), paint their faces, make non-linguistic noises, refuse to speak in words, make up imaginary languages. In developmental psychological terms, games serve to rehearse people (or monkeys or cats) in complex behaviour patterns, needing practice; [...] Young animals play the games most suited to their inner state and developmental needs at any time; games are not arbitrary but pre-selected by innate self-organizing learning programs. [...] What the avantgarde seem to be playing at is practice making up rules and telling other people what to do and disapproving of them if they don't comply. " - Andrew Duncan, Angel Exhaust 9

Prose/Narrative (back to top)

• • "for the seventeenth century reader (as for Aristotle), versimilitude meant integrity of character and conformity with an idea of human nature, while for the modern reader, who has been taught to distrust this notion, and consequently cannot rely on models of "natural" behaviour, the idea of verisimilitude is transposed from the realm of psychological motivations to the realm of the statistical probability of external events", p.59
  • "From the reader's point of view Plot Holes are much more disturbing than Cheap Plot Tricks, because the latter are immediately recognizable, while the former arouse the suspicion: Am I stupid?" , p.66
  • "The rejection of Cheap Plot Tricks by some audiences is symptomatic of their distrust of plot as an adequate way to represent reality", p.69
  • "Cheap Plot Tricks continued their decline in modernism, together with heavily plotted stories. But as Dannenberg observes, they are presently enjoying a minor revival because their contrived and conventional nature can be used in support of the postmodernist/structuralist view that language constructs, rather than reflects reality", p.70
  from "Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design", Marie-Laue Ryan, "Narrative", Vol 17.1
• "Many poets are good at complication but handle the resolution badly", Aristotle Poetics, (8.6, 30)
• "the optimum relationship between narrative and narrated time seems to be about 1:1. Extended passages of the modes which seem either very fast or altogether stopped are not nowadays in favour", Helmut Bonheim,"The Narrative Modes", D.S. Brewer, 1982, p.46
• "Not so many modern stories end in death, whereas the stories of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville often do ... Also available is the wedding, which is a staple of the novel. But less than one percent of short stories end with it", Helmut Bonheim,"The Narrative Modes", D.S. Brewer, 1982, p.138-9
• "Short stories tend to ironic endings, which novels do not", Helmut Bonheim,"The Narrative Modes", D.S. Brewer, 1982, p.167
• "In Ireland, maybe because we don't have that great tradition of the Victorian novelist, short stories have grown as rapidly as in America", William Trevor,"Guardian Review", 05/09/2009
• "to enjoy a novel we must feel surrounded by it on all sides ... In order to establish its own inner world it must dislodge and abolish the surrounding one", Ortega y Gasset,"Notes on the novel", 1948
• "Metamorphosis is thus an indispensable motor in almost all narrative. If Kafka seems so singular a narrator it's because he denounced the effect ... Meanwhile he writes a story entitled Metamorphosis to ridiculae the act itself", Paolo Mauri,"Buio", Einaudi, 2007, p.110 (my translation)
• "This sensation of the multiplication of possibilities, very strong in me, has always turned me away from narration; and I regard the streams that flow from others with the admiration of a man for whom the contemplation and analysis of a glass of water are quite sufficient to absorb his time and curiosity", Paul Valéry, "Collected Works of Paul Valéry, II, 88"
• "Planting is, quickly simply, the use of disguised coincidence in the resolution of a conflict: the coincidence is disguised by planting it somewhere in the opening of the story and then keeping it alive throughout the story until it is needed for the ending", AH Jaffe and V.Scott, Studies in the Short Story, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968, p.156
• "a short story is to a novel as a hot air balloon is to a passenger jet", Seán Ó Faoláin
• "my characters are galley slaves", Nabokov
• "The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way.", E.M. Forster
• "The art of the storyteller lies, of course, in surprise, but the art of surprise must come from the continuous knowledge that the reader, in his anxiety, is always playing for safety. It is the storyteller's business to make the path of safety into a path of change and danger", V.S. Pritchett
• "there are three rules to writing novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are", Somerset Maugham
• "as usual, I am bored by narrative", Virginia Woolf, "A Writer's Diary", 1929.
• "While fiction is a mode of travel into textual space, narrative is a mode of travel within the confines of this space." Narrative and State Transition. Narrative v non-Narrative elements. Narrative Grammars - trees, graphs, stacks (frames), "Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory", M.Ryan, Indiana University Press, 1991. p.5.
• "The story is a site of disruption or resistance through which the text is fractured, brought up against its own otherness to itself. ... The story deforms what gives it form; in other words its form is uneasy, precarious, and at best provisional, it never entirely accommodates the material which it nevertheless makes intelligible", Levinas, quoted in "After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory", Colin Davis, Routledge, 2004, p.89, 146
• "Every human experience is a life in search of a narrative. This is not simply because it strives to discover a pattern to cope with the experience of chaos and confusion. It is also because each human life is always already an implicit story. Our very finitude constitutes us as being who, to put it baldly, are born at the beginning and die at the end.", Richard Kearney, "On Stories", Routledge, 2001
• "The institution of writing and reading serious novels is like a grand old Middle American city gutted and drained by superhighways. Ringing the depressed inner city of serious work are prosperous clonal suburbs of mass entertainments. ... What remain, mostly, are ethnic and cultural enclaves. Much of contemporary fiction's vitality now reside in the black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay and woman's communities, which have moved into the structures left behind by the departing straight white male. The depressed literary inner city also remains home to solitary artists who are attracted to the diversity and grittiness that only a city can offer, and to a few still-vital cultural monuments (the opera of Toni Morrison, the orchestra of John Updike, the museum of Edith Wharton) to which suburban readers continue to pay polite Sunday visits", Franzen, "Harper's Magazine", April 1996, p.39
• "metanarrative comments can even support the illusion of authenticity of the narrated story ... This is particularly the case in the story-orientated and genre-specific forms of metanarration found in many seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels... Since the 1970s however, metanarrative expressions tend to be a metafictional means of destroying the aesthetic illusion", Angar Nünning, in "The dynamics of narrative form", John Piper (ed), 2004, Walter de Gruyter, p.34
• "In Elizabethan prose and other precursors of the seventeeth-century novel, metanarrative expressions tend to be realistically motivated, of limited number, and relatively isolated .... In most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novels a larger number of metanarrative expressions than in Renaissance prose occurs. Prior to Sterne, however, they do not serve primarily as a means of destroying the aesthetic illusion ... Beginning with Laurence Sterne and then in Romantic narrative prose, a basic change took place concerning the importance and functions of metanarration, which, from the late eighteenth century onwards, began to play a more central role, developing in the direction of metafiction. ... In realistic nineteenth-century novels, metanarrative expressions again have quite different functions: ... they primarily serve to create a trust-inducing conversation between the explicit narrator and the narratee. ... The ubiquity of metanarrative expressions since the beginnings of the novel ... tends to decline in modernism", Angar Nünning, in "The dynamics of narrative form", John Piper (ed), 2004, Walter de Gruyter, p.40-45
• "the characteristics that make schizophrenic stories unlike the standard narrative form are much the same as those that differentiate traditional from modernist literature in general", Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism, Harvard Univ Press, 1992, p.159

The Visual Arts (back to top)

• "Pound and Stevens ... became for poetry what Picasso and Mondrian were to painting", (p.10), Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, Charles Altieri, CUP, 1989
• • "Simple to transport, display, document, and insure, Conceptual art in several of its forms risked becoming a ready answer to the dealer's prayer for formal novelty combined with radical pretension". p.34
  • "affluent, white, male gay taste he characterised in terms of ornamentation, an interest in the luxurious proliferation of detail, an oblique angle of vision, fantasy, theatricality, and 'in terms of content, an interest in, an identification with, the underdog'" Edmund White, p.145
  From "The Art of Today", Brandon Taylor, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995
• "Writing is fifty years behind painting", Brion Gysin, "Cut-Ups Self-Explained", 1958.
• Simonides called painting mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture
• "All the studies of Williams agree that he takes the analogy with painting literally and strives for an equivalency of words. Stevens' relation to painting is a far more figurative and conceptual one", Costello, "Effects of an Analogy", p.66
• The Surrealists insisted on the fundamental relations between the arts. (p.73) "Wallace Stevens and Modern Art", Glen MacLeod, Yale U.P., 1993.
• "The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering", Stevens, "Opus Posthumous", ed Milton Bates (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, p.203)
• "Paint not the thing but the effect it produces", Mallarme.
• "To succeed, romanticism depends on a very delicate adjustment between ardour and detachment. In landscape painting such an adjustment is comparatively easy to maintain", Carlos Peacock, "Painters and Writers", The Tate Gallery, 1949, p.5.
• "The world through blunted sight: an inquiry into the influence of defective vision on art and character", P.D. Trevor-Roper, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1988. p.31. "Many creative writers have been myopic" (Keats, Tennyson). Shelley was long-sighted.
• "by the time they have reached the upper end of the primary school their skill often seems to have stagnated and they have generally lost interest in drawing ... often they do not possess the graphic skill to express [their good ideas] in an acceptable way - acceptable to themselves as well as to adults" Maureen Cox, p.17, Times Higher, Feb 23rd, 199?
• "in each visual configuration, be it simple or complex, there exists a built-in trajectory for the observer's gaze." p.25 of "Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts", C. Gandelman, Indiana Univ Press, 1991, quoting "Eye Movements and Visual Perception" in Image, Object, Illusion.
• "Paintings, like women, are ideally silent beautiful creatures designed for the gratification of the eye, in contrast to the sublime eloquence properly to the manly art of poetry. Paintings are confined to the narrow sphere of external display of their bodies and of the space they ornament, while poems are free to range over an infinite realm", Mitchell, Iconology, p.109-110.
• "this romantic wit differs from the metaphysicals ...Both tenor and vehicle.. . are wrought in a parallel process out of the same material ...The river landscape is both the occasion of reminiscence and the source of the metaphor by which the reminiscence is described", Wimsatt, "The Structure of Romantic Imagery" (essay).
• Books - "Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature", Wylie Sypher, (New York: Random house, 1960). "The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting", Wendy Steiner, (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1982). "Classical Literary Criticism", TS Dorsch, Baltimore: Penguin 1965. p.91, "Ars Poetica", Horace. "Ut Pictura Poesis", R. Lee, Norton, 1967. "A Parallel of Poetry and Painting", Dryden, 1695. "Laocoo"n, Lessing, 1766, "Method in the Study of Literature in Its Relation to the Other Arts", Giovannini, J of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 8 (1950), 185-195.

Science (back to top)

• "There's no better evidence for the relevance of Snow's chasm between the two than the nature of the attempts by literary intellectuals to bridge it ... In general, if, as we have seen, all attempts to bridge the gulf between Snow's two poles have failed ... do we need to bridge the gulf in the first place? After all - to put it in the most simplistic terms - art and science are performing very different functions", Roger Caldwell, in "PN Review", v35.6 (2009, Jul-Aug), p.20-21
• "Fractals may be the most complex and the most subtle examples of patterns found in both mathematics and poetry ... When poets borrowed ideas from fractal geometry and applied them to the reading and writing of poetry, they made a remarkable intellectual leap", M. Birken and A.C.Coon, "Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry", Rodopi, 2008, p.167
• "as free verse broke the pentameter, fractal verse can break the poem plane or linguistic surface", Alice Fulton, in "Feeling as a Foreign Language", Greywolf Press, 1999, p.5
• "digression, interruption, fragmentation, and lack of continuity will be regarded as formal functions, rather than lapses into formlessness", Alice Fulton, in "Feeling as a Foreign Language", Greywolf Press, 1999, p.58
• "As Lisa Steinman has shown, developments in science and technology had an important influence on Modernist poetics in America in the 1920s and 1930s ... Yet the feting of the scientific as a new aesthetic also became part of an elision which equated science with a hard, dry objective voice, which in its turn became equated with masculinity", Deryn Rees-Jones, in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997 , p.268
• "In general, scientists discover past art, whereas artists invent future science", Argyros, "Blessed Rage for Order", p.345
• "authors are reacting not to science as such, but to a more general set of ideas pervasive in the culture", Hayles, "The Cosmic Web", Cornell University Press, 1984, p.24
• "Art and physics, like wave and particle, are an integrated duality: They are simply two different but complementary facets of a single description of the world", Leonard Shlain, "Art and Physics", William Morrow, 1991, p.24
• "We show that famous intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard and Deleuze have repeatedly abused scientific concepts and terminology: either using scientific ideas totally out of context, without giving the slightest justification ... or throwing around scientific jargon in front of their non-scientist readers without any regard for its relevance or even its meaning", Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, "Fashionable Nonsense: postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science" Picador, 1998, p.x
• "one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant", Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, "Fashionable Nonsense: postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science" Picador, 1998, p.153
• [both literature and mathematics] "proceed from postulates, not facts; both can be applied to external reality and yet exist also in a 'pure' or self-contained form. Both, furthermore, drive a wedge between the antithesis of being and non-being that is so important for discursive thought", Frye, "Anatomy of Criticism", 1957, p.351
• "there may be something like a scientific approach incorporated into something which may still be poetry, but not vice versa", Miroslav Holub, "Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science", Robert Crawford (ed), OUP, 2006
• "poetic appropriations of science are more akin to a negative theology of science", Drew Milne, "Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science",Robert Crawford (ed), OUP, 2006
• "The rival ways of looking at the world - the cool, detached light of disinterested scientific reason, and the red-blooded passionate creations of the artist - constitute the modern incoherence. Both appear equally true, equally valid, at times, but are fundamentally incompatible", Peter Watson, "Ideas", Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005, p.610.
• "The scientists' distrust of the senses that poets distrust so deeply also has a liberating, stimulating effect on the imagination and even on reality", Emily Grosholz, in "The Measured Word", Kurt Brown (ed), Univ of Georgia Press, 2001, p.84
• "I never wanted to write something which would be labelled a scientific poetry. I think it is a nonsense", Holub, in "Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions 2", Neil Astley (ed), 2006, p.34.
• "Contemporary scientists often talk about 'beauty' and 'elegance'. Artists hardly ever do", Siân Ede, Times Higher, Aug 5, 2005, p.19
• "Nothing deep turns on the choice between these two phrases - between the imagery of making and finding ...Physics is the paradigm of 'finding' simply because it is hard (at least in the West) to tell a story of changing physical universes against the background of an unchanging Moral Law or poetic canon, but very easy to tell the reverse sort of story", Rorty, in "On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism", 1983, p.77
• • "the science advocated by the [literary] experimentalists involves two things. First it involves a Baconian mistrust of generalisation... Second, it involves an interest in quasi-mathematical procedures designed to produce a feeling or image which is instantaneously persuasive", p.225
  • "Modern attempts to make poetry scientific... reflect the anxiety that poetry and art are dying", p.225
  • "because many advances in modern science result from innovations in apparatus, experimental poets aim for technical novelties, hoping to produce the kinds of 'breakthroughs' and 'discoveries' that modern science has made", p.227
  • "The aesthetic belief that poetry should be elusive or obscure appears to find confirmation in modern science", p.227
  • "When modern poets emulate scientific procedure, they emulate it in two principal ways. Either they pursue a methodology that has a rigidity considered to be scientific, or they collect and present particulars in a manner which they regard as analogous to scientific data gathering", p.260
  From "Missing Measures", Timothy Steele, University of Arkansas Press, 1990
• Francois Jacob from Stand 2(4)/3(1), 2001
  • "In the imaginative phase of scientific processes, in the formation of hypotheses, the scientist operates like an artist. It is only afterwards, when critical testing and experimentation are involved, that science draws away from art and goes down a different track" (p.118)
  • "It is by undoing what he or she perceives as reality in order to remake it differently that the painter, the poet, or the scientist builds up a vision of the universe. Each fashions a personal model of reality by choosing to highlight aspects of experience judged to be most telling, and discarding those that seem uninteresting. We live in a world created by our brains, with continual comings and goings between the real and imaginary. Perhaps the artist draws more on the latter and the scientist on the former. It is simply a matter of proportion, not of nature" (p.120)
• "there is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature", W. Whewell, "The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences", 18??
• "The Science of Art", Martin Kemp, Yale University Press, 1990. p.251 Friedrich von Schelling - "Art constitutes the ideal of science, and where art is, science has yet to attain to" (from "System of Transcendental Idealism" - 1800)
• "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.", Paul Dirac
• • p.130 - "At first glimpse one might suspect that literature would be closer to the sciences than other art forms, because sciences also use words and depend on syntax for expressing their findings and formulating ideas. ... [but] There is no common language and there is no common network of relations and references. Actually, modern painting has in some ways come closer to the new scientific notions and paradigms, precisely because a painter's vocabulary, colours, shapes and dimensions are not congruent to the scientist's vocabulary."
  • p.132 - "In the use of words, poetry is the reverse of the sciences. Sciences bar all secondary factors associated with writing or speaking; ... poetry tries for as many possibilities as it can."
  • p.143 - "The emotional, aesthetic and existential value is the same ... when looking into the microscope ... and when looking into the nascent organism of the poem"
  From "The Dimension of the Present Moment", M. Holub, Faber and Faber, 1990
• "art is made to trouble but science reassures" - Braque

Writing and Society (back to top)

• "During a recent research project into reading habits conducted at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, a cross-section of the public nominated poetry to be the most annoying category of book currently published .... after a sustained period of reading poems, thirty six complained of headaches or migraine, twenty-seven suffered indigestion, and two became argumentative resulting in violent exchange .... eighty-two of the hundred people tested did fall asleep for prolonged periods at some point during their reading of poetry. ... Of the twenty [sic] that were reading only first collections, forty-five became tense and highly agitated, thirty-eight were lethargic and dulled and three were recorded as feeling nauseous, while one particular man became sexually aroused and had to be physically removed from the building.", "The Rialto", (Summer 2009), p.59
• "A typical poet in North America finds it necessary to relocate every year for the first few years after college, and every several years for a couple of decades after that. The poet becomes disconnected, never developing a true sense of place or of community outside the community of the printed page. The typical poet teaches", Sam Hamill, "A Poet's Work", Broken Moon Press, 1990, p.29
• "Seizing on a traditional trope of the poet as exceptional individual, certain individuals receiving health-care who feel themselves to be exceptional apparently adopt poetic discourse as part of that role", Fiona Sampson, in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997, p.261
• "You do not put yourself into your writing, you find yourself there", Alan Bennett, "???"
• "poetry isn't really an open system; it's a combination of odd institutions, personal networks, hoary traditions, talent and blind luck. It's both an art and a guild, in other words", David Orr, New York Times, November 21, 2004
• "When we were judging [The Booker] we tried three different voting systems and each time a different winner emerged", Rowan Pelling, the Observer, March 9, 2008
• "as civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines", Macaulay, 1825.
• "It is already, I think, fair to say that a majority of print, as it is emitted daily, is, at least in the broad sense of the term, a caption", "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner, OUP, 1972, p.198
• "Democratic nations naturally stand more in need of forms than other nations, and they naturally respect them less", Tocqueville,
• "Taken as a whole, literature in democratic ages can never present, as it does in periods of aristocracy, an aspect of order, regularity, science and art ... Style will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose ... The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste", Tocqueville, "Democracy in America", 1840.
• • xii-xiii - "'culture' ... means all those practices, like the arts of description, communication,and representation, that have relative automony from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure ... Secondly [...] culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society's reservoir of the best that has been known and thought. ... In time culture comes to be associated, often aggressively, with the nation or state... Culture in this sense is a source of identity"
  • xiii - "The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them."
  • xxviii - "We are still the inheritors of [the] style by which one is defined by the nation, which in turn derives its authority from a supposedly unbroken tradition. In the United States this concern over cultural identity has of course yielded up the contest over what books and authorities constitute 'our' tradition."
  • xxix - "the battle within [American identity] is between advocates of a unitary identity and those who see the whole as a complex but not reductively unified one. This opposition implies two different perspectives, two histiographies, one linear and subsuming, the other contrapuntal and nomadic."
  • p.9 - "in the English and French cases, the sheer distance of attractive territories summoned the projection of far-flung interests"
  • p.84 - "imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible, I would argue, to read one without in some way dealing with the other."
  • p.93 - "The appropriation of history, the historicization of the past, the narrativization of society, all of which give the novel its force, include the accumulation and differentiation of social space."
  • p.229 - "To deal with [importing the foreign into Europe], a new encyclopaedic form became necessary, one that three distinctive features. First was a circularity of structure, inclusive and open at the same time: Ulysses ...Second was a novelty based almost entirely on the reformation of old, even outdated fragments ... Third is the irony of a form that draws attention to itself at substituting art and its creations for the once-possible synthesis of the world empires... Spatiality becomes, ironically, the characteristic of an asthetic rather than of political domination."
  from "Culture & Imperialism", E.W. Said, Chatto & Windus, 1993.
• "My generation haven't had criticism; they've had marketing.", Paul Farley, The Guardian, April 2005
• "We felt that the main prizewinners should touch on ... the big issues of death and love", Matthew Sweeney, New Welsh Review, No. 40.
• "Publishing a book of verse is like dropping a rose petal in the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo", Don Marquis (quoted on p.10 of the Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997)
• In the US there are 900 regular buyers of hardback poetry books and 2500 regular buyers of paperback poetry books. "everybody wants to be a poet", The NYT, Aug 29th, 1979, p.C17, M. Kakutoni
• "in the late 1940s, America was a nation of 150 million people, with an annual total of 8,000 book titles per year of all types and something under 200 publishing poets who were active enough to generate books. Today, the United States has twice as many people, but is now publishing, according to Bowker, over 290,000 book titles per year, of which some 4,000 titles alone are poetry. There must be somewhere between ten and twelve thousand publishing poets in the U.S. today in contrast with 200 fifty years ago.", Ron Silliman, "Silliman's Blog", Thursday, June 14, 2007
• "A course called Verse Making was available at Iowa in 1897, and from 1906 to 1925 George Pierce Baker taught a drama workshop at Harvard, the first graduate writing course in the country" [In 2009 the USA had 822 degree programs in creative writing. 37 of these award Ph.Ds. There were 153 creative-writing M.F.A. programs. The first British master's-degree program in creative writing opened in 1970. The first undergraduate degree program was in 1991], Louis Menand,"Should creative writing be taught?", New Yorker, June 8, 2009
• In 2002 "fewer than 25 books of short stories were produced by mainstream publishers. And two thirds were by writers from abroad." - Debbie Taylor, Mslexia, Spring 2003.
• "In 1892 Walter Besant ... calculated that there were approximately a hundred novelists living in Britain living by their writing", "London Review of Books", 2nd Nov, 2006, p.12
• "three-quarters of all periodical literature in the late 19th century was fiction, and serialisation could be highly lucrative", "London Review of Books", 2nd Nov, 2006, p.12
• "A recent Arts Council study notes that only four per cent of the total sales of the best-selling 1000 poetry books in 1998-1999 were of contemporary poetry. The Arts Council study identifies Faber as responsible for 90 per cent of the sales ... and notes that collections by Seamus Heaney account for 67 per cent of these sales", staple 54
• "The survey found that the gender gap was most pronounced among poetry readers, with women outnumbering men by nearly three to one. This finding was confirmed by research commissioned by the Arts Council of England for National Poetry Day which discovered that the majority of poetry books are bought by women over the age of 45", MsLexia, 2001)
• "When I sit down to write I often don't know whether it's a poem or a critical piece that's going to be produced", David Kennedy, "binary myths" (Andy Brown ed.), p.16.
• "the writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation", James Fenton
• "the London Magazine ... found itself embroiled in a quarrel which was to result in its editor, John Scott, being killed in a duel" - "The Function of Criticism", T. Eagleton, Verso, 1984, p.37
• "My maxim would be for God's sake write about what you don't know! For how else will you bring your imagination into play? How else will you discover or explore anything?", Graham Swift in "The Agony and the Ego", ed. C. Boylan (Penguin).
• "The art really is in isolating yourself and letting as few things into your head as possible. To only admit those things into your head that come from a direction where no one else ever looks", W.G. Sebald, Pretext 7, 2003, p.22
• "The more homogeneous a society is, the more writers it will produce, but the less good writers", W.G. Sebald, Pretext 7, 2003, p.22
• • p.25 - "the urge to create ... must always be partly the need to escape everyday reality"
  • p.49 - "Most mature artists know that great general knowledge is more a hindrance than a help."
  From "The Tree", John Fowles, The Sumach Press, 1992.
• "an intelligent writing which ... can defend itself and knows when to speak and when to answer and when to be silent", Socrates, Phaedrus
• • "To my mind [workshops] represent the infantilisation of a perfectly serious subject and are mostly a waste of time"
  • "My own line is that the poem begins with inspiration and ends in publication, not just completion"
  From "The Times Higher", Don Paterson, June 30th, 2006, p.16
• • (from Psychology Today, April 1987) - "Nancy Andreasen has tracked 30 students from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. 80% had mood disorders (30% is average amongst similar people who are non-writers). 43% had some degree of manic-depressive illness (10% is average). 2 committed suicide over the 15 years of the study", p.74
  • "A great many writers find relating both painfully difficult and beside the point. The same qualities that make them writers - self-direction, independence, intelligence, skepticism, a love of solitude - also incline them in the direction of isolation, alienation and a carelessness about relating.", p.125
  From "Living the Writer's Life", Eric Maisel

Miscellaneous (back to top)

• America
  • "Much contemporary American poetry isn't interested in the aural effects British readers have been trained to associate with poetry; British readers may find American poems' line breaks arbitrary, the arrangement of lines or stanzas bizarre or arbitrary, the narrative sense muddled and obscure.", Hannah Brooks-Motl, "Aristocracies of One", in "Contemporary Poetry Review", 2009
  • "What is different between American and British poetry is that, in the last few decades or so, American poetry hasn't needed to worry about combating or complicating its mainstream because it hasn't had one. ", Hannah Brooks-Motl, "Aristocracies of One", in "Contemporary Poetry Review", 2009
  • "It does make sense to talk about "mainstream poetry" in the UK in a way that it does not in the US", Hannah Brooks-Motl, "Aristocracies of One", in "Contemporary Poetry Review", 2009
  • "From Bryant on there is scarcely one American poet whose work, if unsigned, could be mistaken for that of an Englishman", Auden, "Faber Book of Modern American Poetry", 1956, p.i
  • "[the rise of the creative-writing workshop is] the most important event in postwar American literary history", Mark McGurl,"The Program Era", Harvard, 2009
  • "As McGurl notes, virtually all the major figures in Latino literature have been American academics. The same is true of Asian-American novelists, many of whom have held university appointments, and of Native American writers. ... These writers have a special relation to the "outside contained on the inside" feature of academic creative-writing programs, and many of the most celebrated have been accused of inauthenticity", Louis Menand,"Should creative writing be taught?", New Yorker, June 8, 2009
  • "Career success as a poet and tenure in an English department have become ever more intertwined. For example, of the last eleven Pulitzer Prize winners, ten have either held faculty positions at a college or university or have extensive university teaching experience", Jay Ladin, "Parnassus", 2006, V29, p.120
  • "Not surprisingly, the US poetry field strikes many critics as increasingly carnivalesque and chaotic. If there is a center or axis, it is probably represented by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop poem. This is the self-consciously prosaic confessional lyric of 20-40 free-verse lines", Vincent B. Leitch, "Living with Theory", Blackwell, 2008, p.103
  • "I do not think anyone in the States would argue that US male poets far outnumber US female poets; in the States, the most influential poets living - on almost anyone's list - are mostly women. Why are things different in Albion?", Catherine Wagner, "Jacket 34"
  • "the contemporary [American] University remains the most sweeping patron that poetry has ever known; it maintains and defines its traditions, employs and trains its practitioners, and hosts a huge section of its audience", Kevin Walzer, "The Resurgence of Traditional Poetic Form and the Current State of Poetry's Place in American Culture", Edwin Mellon Press, 2001, p.100
  • "If at times it reads more like a history of the American University than a history of American poetry, that is because those two histories are largely inseparable", Kevin Walzer, "The Resurgence of Traditional Poetic Form and the Current State of Poetry's Place in American Culture", Edwin Mellon Press, 2001, p.97
  • "America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres", Emerson, "The Poet", 1842
  • "American poetry is characteristically tendentious, over-committed, programmatic, self-conscious, often - even in its moments of grandeur - provincial and jejune", Roy Harvey Pearce, "The Continuity of American Poetry", Princeton Univ Press, 1961, p.4
  • "an obsession with form has been widespread in American poetry", John Hollander, "Vision and Resonance", Yale Univ Press, 1985
  • "Just as in their political thinking Americans are apt to identify the undemocratic with monarchy, so, in their aesthetics, they are apt to identify the false conventional with rhyme and meter", Auden, "The Dyer's Hand and other essays", Vintage, 1968, p.364
  • American poets are "challenged by their culture and so driven more deeply than others into the erotic and instinctual resources of the individual psyche", Gelpi, "The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet", Harvard Univ Press, 1975, p.xii
  • "All the developments in English verse since 1910 are due almost wholly to Americans", Pound, "How to Read", 1931, p.43
• Britain
  • "Huk concludes that, rather than being formally conservative, some UK poets are tackling the same difficult issues as their most experimental American counterparts, only approaching these issues via a postmodern critique of empiricism", Vicki Betram, in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997 , p.190
  • "The British resistance to modern art and ideas is tangled up with a nostalgia for the wonderfully and morbidly over-developed culture of childhood", Andrew Duncan, "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", 2003, p.303
  • "There is a distaste in Britain for speculative philosophy. This may go back to the church settlement of 1662, when peace seemed to depend on theological compromise. There is a connection between weakness in building philosophical speculations, distaste for political innovations, and lack of imagination in poetry", Andrew Duncan, "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", 2003, p.305
  • "For the socially repressed and incompetent Brits, [poetry] functions much like alcohol - it's a mask that we can put on when we want to slip the bonds of buttoned-up convention ... if one of the main reasons people turn to poetry these days is as a facilitator that allows a degree of cultural remission when it come to the expression of emotions, then the reason men are more drawn to it is presumably that men need it more ... poets enjoy a special license to express their emotions in public - a licence usually denied to men more than to women", Ross Cogan, "'Englishness' and the McPoets" in Acumen 59, September 2007
  • "British poets, on the whole, have not gone as far in the direction of anti-poetry as their contemporaries in other countries; but, notoriously, they have not gone as far in any direction whatever for a very long time", Michael Hamburger, "The Truth of Poetry", Carcanet, 1982, p.262
  • "Sometimes I wonder if England ever came to modern art at all", Donald Hall, "Faber Book of Modern Verse", 1966
• Words are ...
  • "Words are locked coffins in which the corpses still lie breathing", Don Paterson
  • "words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap", Tzara
  • "Words/are the wise men's counters, they do but/reckon with them, but they are the money/of fools", Andrew Crozier, "The Veil Poem"
• The Long Poem
  • "a long poem will always be felt ... to be something unnatural and hollow", J.S. Mill, 1838
  • "[a long poem is] simply a flat contradiction in terms", E.A. Poe, 1848
• Thoughts, feelings and poetry
  • "The problem with most free verse is that it locates wisdom in the self and not in language", Glyn Maxwell, "Bloodaxe Books catalogue", 1995
  • "Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings", Umberto Eco, "The Independent", 1995
  • "The word 'therefore' is no more stale than the word 'dawn', and has just as much imagery about it", William Empson, "Argufying in Poetry", 1963, p.170.
  • "It is a fundamental mistake of grammarians and writers ... to suppose that words ... are the immediate representatives of things ... Words correspond to thoughts", Coleridge, "letter to James Gillman", 1827
  • "The logical faculty has infinitely more to do with Poetry than the Young and the inexperienced, whether writer or critic, ever dreams of", Wordsworth, letter of 14th Sept, 1827.
  • "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth", Larkin, "Required Writing", p.47.
  • • p.182 - "Eliot observed that to continue to develop stylistically, a writer had to continue to develop emotionally."
    • p.187 - "Style; sensibility and technique distinctively brought together, frees the writer from the weight of her own personality, gives to her an incandescence of personality, so that what she can express is more than, other than, what she is."
    From "Art Objects", J. Winterson, Jonathan Cape, 1995.
  • "intelligence, of which an important function is the discernment of exactly what, and how much, we feel in any given situation", T.S. Eliot, The Egoist, iv (1917), 151.
  • "no ideas but in things", W.C. Williams, A Sort of Song.
  • "Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler", Nietzsche, "The Gay Science", s 360.
  • "Our most important thoughts are those which contradict our feelings", Valéry, "Oeuvres" 2:642, 764; Collected Works 14:470, 9:177.
  • "Nature has no outline. Imagination has", Blake
  • "Imagination ... is nothing but decaying sense", Hobbes, "Leviathan", I,2. He went on to add that, when its decay has made it fade, it becomes what we know as a "memory".
• Quotes about the famous
  • "Mr Yeats has once and for all stripped English poetry of its perdamnable rhetoric. He has boiled away all that is not poetic - and a great deal that is", Pound, "Poetry Review", 1:2, 1912
  • "[Keats was] a poet who respected semblances. ... [Shelley] had no eyes", William Morris, in "William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary" by E.P.Thompson, 1977, p.10
  • "He is this afternoon writing a poem with great spirit: always a sign of well being with him. Needless to say, it is an intensely dismal poem", Florence Hardy, letter to Sidney Cockerell
  • "Wordsworth was technically incompetent at least until 1801 ... The early poems, when they succeed, do so by virtue of invention; the language is as nearly irrelevant as it can be in poetry", Donald Davie,"Purity of Diction in English Verse", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967, p.112-3
  • "Blake, in fact, gives us so good an introduction to the nature and structure of poetic thought that, if one has any interest in the subject at all, one can hardly avoid exploiting him", Northrop Frye, in "Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism and Society" (ed Bloom), Cornell UP, 1970, p.234-5
  • "What I like most about Eliot is that though one of his hearts, the poetic one, has died and been given a separate funeral ... he continues to visit the grave", Graves, "The Crowning Privilege"
  • "[Elizabeth Bishop] was a poet's poet (John Ashbery called her a writer's writer's writer) but she was not a lesbian's lesbian", Fenton, "The Strength of Poetry", OUP, 2001, p.127
  • " [Rilke,] the Santa Claus of loneliness", Auden.
  • "[P.G. Wodehouse is] English Literature's performing flea", Sean O'Casey.
• Dreams
  • "Dreams and reading have much in common. In both we generate images out of a limited visual field. These images move and disturb us ... yet they arrive without overt explanations and require us to work for meaning", Lindsay Clarke, from The Creative Writing Coursebook, Macmillan
  • "Dreams and poems are engaged in some of the same tasks and use some of the same tools. Both, in my experience, somehow know and can convey unappealing truths to which the waking person, the person living her daily life in prose, seems to lack access", Rachel Hadas, The Formalist V14.2, p.51
  • "Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself. Not a message that comes at the end of the poem, more like a pathological condition that deforms every word - a resonance, a manner of speaking, a nervous tic, a pressure. And this invisible subject only shows up when you're speaking the language you speak when no one is there to correct or applaud you", Alice Oswald, BBC web site, 2005
  • "At first I thought I couldn't sleep through it. Then I found a way of transposing the sounds into images so that they entered my dreams without waking me up.", Cage, "Radical Artifice", Marjorie Perloff, 1991, University of Chicago Press, p.xiv
  • "For the common man it is the dream, if at all, that binds together in a new rationale, disparate elements. The job of the poet is to let the binding happen in daylight.", "Art Objects", J. Winterson, Jonathan Cape, 1995, p.75
• Beauty
  • "beauty is nothing/but the beginning of terror", Rilke, "The First Elegy"
  • "A work is never beautiful unless it escapes the artist in some way", Sartre
  • "La beauté sera CONVULSIVE, ou ne sera pas", Breton.
• Fractals
  • "As free verse broke the pentameter, fractal verse breaks the poem plane. The poem plane is analogous to the picture plane in painting: a two-dimensional surface that can convey the illusion of spatial depth. ... Just as paint fosters illusions of proximity and distance on canvas, words can suggest spatial depth on paper. A fractal poem can do this by shifting its linguistic densities: The poem's transparent, 'easy' passages impart the sensation of negative space; they vanish into meaning when read rather than calling attention to their linguistic presence. More textured language, on the other hand, refuses to yield its mass immediately. The eye rests on top of the words, trying to gain access, but is continually rebuffed", Alice Fulton, in "The Measured Word", Kurt Brown (ed), Univ of Georgia Press, 2001, p.119
  • • "Narrow spectral bands" of scale, p.68
    • "the fractal nature of our contrived taxonomies", p.191
    from "Mots d'order", J. Natoli, State Univ of New York Press, 1992.
• Old Age
  • "After working on one's poetry for several years, it is normal for the primitive autobiographical drive to come to an end. At this point, you have the time to devise new ways of working; a new generator of the unpredictable is needed, and this is supplied by chance or indeterminate procedures, combined with rules chosen to generate new decisions. Of course, if you believe only in autobiographical poetry, this temporary pause is not liberation, but a source of depression, neurosis, and eclipse", Andrew Duncan, "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", 2003, p.39
  • "It's strange, being old. One thing that's clear: inspiration becomes rarer, and imagination less intense and spontaneous", Donald Hall, APR, Mar/Apr 2005
  • "The aging process almost always brings to the poet the secret conviction that he has settled for far too little ... All his lifelong struggle with 'craft' seems a tragic and ludicrous waste of time", Dickey, "The Young American Poets" (ed Carroll), 1968.
• Memory
  • "each art has a different relation to forgetting. From that standpoint, poetry is privileged. A person reading a Baudelaire sonnet cannot skip a single word. If he loves it he will read it several times and perhaps aloud. If he adores it, he will learn it by heart. Lyric poetry is a fortress of memory", "The Curtain", Milan Kundera, Faber & Faber 2007
  • "Not only is memory the mother of the Muses, as the Greeks called her; she is also the mother of the modes. Her first and continually youngest child is perception, but her seemingly eldest children are retrospection and assertion" - "The Poetics of the Mind's Eye", C Collins, Univ of Pennsylvania, 1991, p.116
• Similarity
  • "We meet with the fact that recurrence also implies difference, that coincidence on one level only highlights non-coincidence on another", Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Ardis, 1976, p.58
  • "every act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike", Bronowski, "Science and Human Values"
• Part/Whole
  • "All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn. It is the very art of turnings, toward the white frame of the page", McHugh, "Broken English", Wesleyan Univ Press, 1993, p.75
  • "It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial.", Louise Gluck, "Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry", Ecco, 1994, p.74
  • "a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination", Barthes, "The Death of the Author"
  • "There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones" - On a Raised Beach, MacDiarmid
  • "the ruins of my being [are] fragments of the divine", Hesse
  • "Even where art insists on the greatest degree of dissonance and disharmony, its elements are those of unity", Theodor Adorno, "Asthetische Theorie", Suhrkramp, 1970, p.235
• Religion
  • "I cannot see that poetry can ever be separated from something which I should call belief, and to which I cannot see any reason for refusing the name of belief", Eliot, "???",1927
  • "Religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely in the way in which they are attached to practical affairs. Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry", Santayana, "Interpretations of Poetry and Religion", 1900, (preface)
• Women
  • "[AJP] Taylor also observes that '[c]asualties were about three times heavier in proportion among junior officers than with common soldiers', a factor which cannot be ignored in the study of a body of women's poetry which is almost exclusively middle class. ... Ouditt observes that war is 'isolating and annihilating for women who live their lives through their men and who then lose their entire investment'", Gill Plain, in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997, p.27
  • "maintaining the division between poetry for so-called therapy and poetry as high-art is, according to Hooley, 'the last bastion of male authority'. This idea seems slightly excessive", Declan Long, in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997 , p.93
  • "looked at from a woman's perspective it is precisely those relational, interactive and heterogeneous processes that form societal and cultural texture, and provide the material for transformation into art", Helen Kidd, in "Kicking Daffodils", Vicki Betram (ed), Edinburgh UP, 1997 , p.101
  • "It is interesting how the preoccupation with love, in life or literature, has been turned against women ... The heightened states of emotion out of which male poets were creating poetry were praised as revolutionary; the heightened states of female emotion were denigrated and dismissed as second-rate", Louise Bernikow, "The World Split Open", The Women's Press, 1974, p.5
  • • "The dilemma of the student of poetry who is also passionately interested in women is that she has to find value in a mass of work that she knows to be inferior", p.xi
    • "poet is always male and muse always female...conscious efforts to weaken this gender-specificity seem to be ineffectual ...Either [women] must impersonate the muse herself or impersonate the male poet", p.xv
    • "This is not to say that we should not work at reclaiming women's work but simply that we should be aware that we are more likely to find heroines than poets", p.xxiv
    • "By the second half of the eighteenth century women poets were so numerous that their writings had lost all novelty value", p.53
    • "Like many other female poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is her own subject matter; first she constructs a self and then she writes about it", p.399
    • "Among male poets suicides are not only relatively few, but also peripheral", p.401
    From "Slip-shod Sibyls", Germaine Greer, Viking, 1995
  • "Women writers might be unique, but their singularity was rarely held up as exemplary", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.9.
  • "Age is important because it takes a generation (at least) to overcome a dominant paradigm", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.10.
• "The fact is that virtually all poetry is now under some kind of institutional supervision", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.30.
• "Even if a poet is pragmatically dedicated to transmitting a message, the temporal delay involved in preparing an artifact (poem as message) plunges the activity into a perceptual realm distinct from the intersubjective circuit of a communications environment", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.40.
• "In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted", Bakhtin, "The Diaglogic Imagination", Univ of Texas, 1981 p.286.
• "Language poets and new formalists must move from the issues of art - what is collected, withheld, made special - to considerations of audience, who will be walled out from these technologies, these new museums of language", Lyn Emanuel, in "Poetry after modernism" (ed Robert McDowell), p.220
• "Olson objected to the use of similes, symbols and comparisons in poetry, regarding them as interferences which would turn consciousness away from the object rather than towards it", N.H.Reeve and Richard Kerridge, "Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne",Liverpool University Press, 1995, p.40
• "[h]ypertext is certainly a new way of writing (with active links) [but] is it truly a new way of reading? And is all that jumping around the same as creating a new text?", Aarseth, "Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature", 1997, p.78
• "it may well be that the novel's time as a major art form is up, as the 'times' of classical tragedy, grand opera, or the sonnet sequence came to be", Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion", Lord John Press, 1967, p.11
• "The movement in the arts away from representation and toward simulation, away from the dynamics of reading and interpretation and toward the dynamics of interaction and play, would indeed suggest that literature as we know it has other worries beyond the power of the image", David Ciccoricco, "Reading Network Fiction", Univ of Alabama Press, 2007, p.4
• "during the nineteenth century, the novel became more painterly", James Wood, "How Fiction Works", Vintage, 2009, p.62
• "Instead of treating verse as a by-product of prose, I suggest that verse is composed directly: that lines are the units of composition. Since lines are not linguistic units, they must be produced by other than the normal linguistic processes, and I will show that this is why lines take on 'poetic' characteristics", Nigel Fabb, "Why is Verse Poetry", PN Review, V36.1, p.52
• "The phenomenal growth of interest in poetry of all kinds since [1992] has been one of the most rewarding aspects of running the Forward Prizes", William Sieghart, "The Forward book of poetry", Forward Ltd, 2008, p.11 ",
• "Like thatching of clog dancing, literary criticism seems to be something of a dying art", Terry Eagleton, "How to Read a Poem",2007, p.1
• "In the human voice, the vowel carries the bulk of the feeling in its complextonal and quantitative discriminations, while the consonants which interrupt that breath makes the bulk of the sense ... It is this exaggerated prominence given to the vowel that primarily distinguishes the characteristic noise of the poem", Don Pasterson, "Poetry Review", 97:3, 2007
• "Young poets should have no individuality", Derek Walcott, "???", 1980
• "Maybe fiction and theory are a bit closer. Theory and poetry are very far apart, and one might say that they were constituted to be so", Terry Eagleton, "Poetry Review", 82:1, 1992
• "In New York the last decadent stages of poetry can be seen in the move by 'Concrete' poets recently toward the use of actual objects and theatre. Can it be that they feel the unreality of their art form? ... Ironically, many of them call themselves 'Conceptual Poets'", Kosuth, "Collected Writings", MIT Press, 1991, p.24,35
• "In the United States, the golden age of artistic inhibition was probably the period immediately following the Second World War, which saw the convergence of two forces. One was a sudden rise in the prestige of psychoanalysis. The second was a tremendous surge in ambition on the part of American artists ... But, as the bar rose, so did everyone's anxiety, and the doctor was called. Many, many writers went into psychoanalysis in those years, and they began writing about the relationship of art and neurosis", Joan Acocella, "Blocked: Why do writers stop writing?", New Yorker, June 14, 2004
• "In a 1993 book called "Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament," the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison argued that manic-depressive illness was the source of much of the best poetry produced from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. ... in "The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain," by Alice W. Flaherty, ... Flaherty thinks that mood disorders may jump-start the literary imagination.... But she goes further, speculating at length on which parts of the brain are responsible for literary creativity and its interruption.", Joan Acocella, "Blocked: Why do writers stop writing?", New Yorker, June 14, 2004
• "Poets have lamented the lack in poetry of any such notation as music has for suggesting sound. But it is there and always has been there. The sentence is the notation", Frost, "???", 1941
• "[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom", Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes"
• "Elliptical poems are obsessed with both persons and personality. Like parataxis, which most employ, they can be read as both symptom and critique of the culture and world they spring from", Hannah Brooks-Motl, "The Dark Horse", Summer 2008
• "It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech ", Olson, "Selected Writings of Charles Olson", p.22
• "in description we hear and feel the absorption of the author in the material. We sense the presence of the creator of the scene. .. This personal absorption is what we mean by 'style.' It is strange that we would choose so oddly surfacey a word - style - for this most soulful aspect of writing. We could, perhaps more exactly, call this relation between consciousness and its subject 'integrity.' What else is the articulation of perception?", Patricia Hampl, "The Dark Art of Description",Iowa Review. Spring 2008. Vol. 38.1
• "lyric became a metphor for the New Criticism [and its reactionary ideology]", Virginia Jackson, "Dickenson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading", Princeton UP, 2005, p.93
• "the most exciting younger poets treat voice and self and identity neither as givens nor as illusions but as problems ... [they] do not represent speech, or stream-of-conscoiusness, or a program for breaking up subjects and systems; instead it's performance and demonstration - if you can hear me through all this noise, I must be real", Burt, "The Elliptical Poets", in "American Letters and Commentary 11, p.46-50
• "The main reason why contemporary poetry is generally ignored or misunderstood is historical. The reading public lost touch with poetry when modern poets lost touch with their audience early in the 20th century. This separation can be traced back to the response of the earlier Romantic poets to the Industrial Revolution", Neil Astley, "Staying Alive", 2002, p.461
• "the wider public, whose understanding of poets is two hundred years out of date and whose awareness of poetry is either a hundred years behind the times or else still stuck in the 1960s", Neil Astley, "Staying Alive", 2002, p.462
• "Much damage has also been done to the public's perception of poetry by attempts to make poetry more "relevant"", Neil Astley, "Staying Alive", 2002, p.462
• "The Gothic imagination turns upon a fear of object, in particular the individual's anxiety of becoming subject to forces beyond its control", Paul March-Russell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.127
• "The chief anxiety of Gothic is possession, so that personal identity is dismembered, either by invasion of the body .. or by physical transformation", Paul March-Russell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.193
• "For the avant-garde, artistic institutions divided the experience of art from the experience of life", Paul March-Russell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.210
• "Despite an emerging consensus that postmodernism is over, recent political events have highlighted the need for the type of ethical thinking advanced within the post-Heideggerian tradition, for example by ... Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, in order to combat manifestations of what Lyotard has termed 'the inhuman", Paul March-Russell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.233
• "If, for the modernist writer, the city existed as a space onto which s/he could map their own psychological terrian, for the postmodernist writer the city is experienced as a rapidly changing domain in flight from ... rational and official discourse", Paul March-Russell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.159
• "the short story is not only closer to the epic than the novel, since chronological time cannot be fully rendered, but it is also more fully a product of the disenchanted age", Paul March-Russell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.121
• ""the progression, the unfolding of personality ... requires space and therefore belongs by definition to a larger [text than a short story], a symphonic plan", Wharton, "The Writing of Fiction", 1997, p.37)
• "In describing the body, Victorian writers had for the most part confined themselves to that which was most expressive about it: its overall shape; or its most characterful component, the face; or a particular feature (eyes, nose, mouth). Edwardian writers chose instead to describe the flesh between features", David Trotter, "T.S. Eliot and Cinema",Modernism/Modernity 13.2 (2006), p.243
• "In contemporary poetry, it is striking how often the tools of the modernists are used to summon a factitious authority and prestige, to obscure premises that would not bear plain examination. Still worse is the use of the ludic, fracturing techniques of postmodernism, which emphasize the poem's difficult texture in order to conceal its absence of genuine insight, accuracy, and challenge. As with any moment in the history of poetry, perhaps, our own is littered with the corpses of once-vital techniques ... Fraudulent self-exposure, which makes no inner demand on poet or reader, and otoise expermentalism, which mistakes novelty for discovery, are typical of the bad poetry of our time, just as other kinds of badness characterised earlier periods", Adam Kirsch, "The Modern Element", W.W.Norton, 2008, p 12-13
• "At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters. Gaps in understanding ... are not only important, they are perhaps even welcome, like clearings in the woods, the better to allow the heart's rays to stream out without obstacle. The unlit shadows should remain obscure, which is the very condition of enchantment", Breton, "???"
• "the prose poem requires ... not only the talent but the works and reputation of an accomplished metricist to make it successful", H.T. Kirby-Smith, "The Origins of Free verse", Univ of Michigan Press, 1999, p.258
• "If lack of ability safely disguises itself for a time in bad free verse, the ultimate refuge of bankrupt talent is the prose poem", H.T. Kirby-Smith, "The Origins of Free verse", Univ of Michigan Press, 1999, p.255
• "When [oxygen and sulphur dioxide] are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum", T.S. Eliot, "Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot", p.41
• "Objectism [sic] is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the 'subject', and his soul by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature .. and those other creatures of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects", Charles Olson, "Projective Verse", p.59
• "With the exception of Eric Mottran, I have not found a single [UK post 1950] critic who has a distinguished record of writing about the poets younger than them", Andrew Duncan, "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", 2003, p.21
• "Poetry book contests privilege serious poems over humorous ones; pathos over wit; 'sincerity' over virtuosity; they eschew satire and persona; and devalue variety in favor of consistency of theme, form, tone, and 'voice'. A swerve into the ineffable in the last few lines of each poem will keep your work 'open' and 'risky' in conformance with current MFA workshop practice. Prefacing poems with epigraphs from fashionable poets (usually in translation) will let the judge know that you are or aspire to be professionally hip", David Alpaugh, "Rattle e.5", 2008, p.14
• "The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft", Prof Nicholas Royle, "Times Higher Education", 10th July, 2008, p.40
• "Now creative writing has taken the place of theory", Julia Bell, "Times Higher Education", 10th July, 2008, p.40
• "we ... have no choice but to write in free verse", Bly, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, Harper and Row, 1990, p.38
• "If there are distinctions between a mainstream centre and an experimental margin, they are no longer sustained by availability or visibility", Ian Davidson, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, p.2
• "It is this tension between language as a means of self-expression, the self as a construct of language. and the poem as a constructed object with an existence independent of the author that provides a framework of ideas within which contemporary poetry operates", Ian Davidson, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, p.92
• "The vertical axis downwards ... need not structure the reading - for it does not structure the text ... Secret meaning is not a hidden layer but a hidden organisation of the surface", Andrews and Bernstein, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, Southern Illinois UP, 1984, p.33
• "[translation is like] kissing through a handkerchief", R.S.Thomas
• "The whole history of modern poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one", Schlegel, "Fragments", 14, No. 115
• "poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry", Schlegel, "Fragments", 51, No. 238
• "Rather than attempting to reduce noise to a minimum, literary communication assumes its noise as a constitutive factor of itself", Paulson, "The Noise of Culture", Cornell UP, 1988, p.83
• "[Literature] opens up a kind of foreign language with language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois, but a becoming-other of language, a minorization of this major language, a delirium that carries it off", Deleuze, "Essays Critical and Clinical", Univ of Minnesota Press, 1997, p.5
• "Such poems set up structures which operate like perpetual motion machines, enacting poised antimonies - opposites equally charged, abiding no exclusive resolution, and operating to create fields of force. The polarities or terminals, in other words, do not annihilate each other's meanings; and we live in the charged field between them, so instead of the vertigo of neither we can have the electricity of both. That is not, as some theorists would have it, the failure of language, but its power", Heather McHugh, "Broken English", Wesleyan University Press, 1993, p.18
• "the era of literary theory crucially shifts interpretation's emphasis from the "what" of meaning (new criticism's "debilitating burden of paraphrase") to the "how" of meaning, the strangely "enabling" task of infinite interpretation ", Jeffrey T. Nealon , "The Swerve around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation", Postmodern Culture V17.3, 2007
• "Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this", Wallace Stevens, "Opus Posthumous", p.61
• "Since art is a means of imposing order upon experience, it puts under erasure, as Derrida would say, all the flux and nonlinearity that constitutes life, but then reinscribes it through narration", Gordon E. Slethaug, "Beautiful Chaos", State University of New York Press, 2000, p.xv
• "We tend to define our poets by that aspect of sensibility they actually must lack and strive towards", Jorie Graham, "Denver Quarterly", V 26, no 4
• "At moments when change outraces our ability to comprehend it, every system of explanation registers the strain. Oppositions that have long structured thought and guided action slip out of alignment, leaving a culture awash in information it cannot process", Adalaide Morris, "Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science", Robert Crawford (ed), OUP, 2006
• "Like a demonstrative, the impersonal pronoun 'it' must always send the reader back or forward to some other noun or phrase. Throughout Ashbery's poem, the word 'it' imparts this momentum of allusion without ever supplying a clear referential destination", Steve Connor, in "Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory", Easthope and Thompson (eds), Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991
• "Just as an alien body falling into a supersaturated solution causes the precipitation of crystals, i.e., reveals the true structure of the dissolved substance, the "alien word" [citations, etc] by its incompatibility with the structure of the text activates that structure", Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Ardis, 1976, p.109
• "The poetic text exists in the field of intersection of many semantic systems, many 'languages.' Information about the language of a communication, its reconstruction by the hearer, the 'schooling' of the hearer in a type of belletristic modeling new to him often constitutes the text's basic information", Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Ardis, 1976, p.107
• "Do not tenses, must they not also be kicked around anew, in order that time, that other governing absolute [with space] must be kept, as must the space-tensions of a poem, immediate, contemporary to the acting-on-you of the poem?", "Projective Verse", Olson, p.56
• "Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system", Yury Lotman, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Ardis, 1976, p.vi
• "a statue of Apollo in a museum does not seem naked, but attach a tie to its neck and it will strike us as indecent ... The text is one of the components of an artistic work, albeit an extremely important component ... But the artistic effect as a whole arises from comparisons of the text with a complex set of ontological and ideological esthetic ideas", Yury Lotman, Ardis, "Analysis of the Poetic Text", 1976, p.23
• • "Ordinary speech is ephemeral, meant to be reacted to and forgotten. Markov chains in speech, therefore, work mostly forward and over a fairly short span. In literature they can also work backward, and there can be more than one chain running at a time", p.35
  • "in arriving at the meaning of an unknown term in a context where the rest is known, the best meaning is that which contributes least to the sum total meaning of the whole context." (Joos Law), p.57
  • "Since communication theory has pretty well established that human interpretation of language is a stochastic process in which the highest probability is always acted on as if it were a certainty, I should submit that when this sharp rise in probability is reached, we no longer question the significance of the parallel", p.100
  From "Constituent and Pattern in Poetry", A.A. Hill, Univ of Texas Press, 1976
• • "To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them", p.176
  • "Functions of technical information, historic record, analytic argument, which are integral and obvious to Dante's use of verse are now almost completely a part of the 'prosaic'", p.180
  From "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner, OUP, 1972
• "The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision .. in Western poetry so much [of the] charged substance is previous poetry", "On Difficulty and Other Essays", George Steiner, OUP, 1972, p.21
• "Ashbery has consciously rejected transparency, received notions of realism in poetry, and confession, all of which were (and still are) believed to be allegorical narratives that naturally culminate in revelation, universal truth, or epiphany. All too often, these states of illuminated insight are familiar and border on cliché. The revelation is not something the poet discovers in the process of writing, but is something he or she already possesses, and must figure out how to package. Such poems are full of detachable symbols and images, triggers that set off the reader's sympathetic Pavlovian response. Ashbery is against both the predictable and the detachable, which allows a poem to be reduced to a theme or be summed up.", John Yau, APR, May/June 2005, p.46
• "The stopgap [Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa'] accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation", "on literature", Umberto Eco, Secker & Warburg, 2005, p.206
• "A text is a set of performances which resemble each other ... Performances can be ranked ... This ranking correalates with 'authority' of the performance. ... The spoken version of a text might be thought more 'authoritative' than the written version", Nigel Fabb, "Language and Linguistic Structure", CUP, 2002, p.137-8
• • "Blake attempted...to interrupt the ordinary processes of this central dynamic structure by feeding into it complex information that it could only reject or reconfigure ... His defiance of the institutional structures of knowledge and the technological divisions that correspond to them resulted in unorthodox works that seemed ungainly if not ugly and shocking to his potential audience, who in their aversion have sometimes perceived a mind operating out of control", p.16
  • "The concept of an isolated episode or accidental occurrence seems to have been anathema to him. Whenever he found a broken connection between A and B, he read it as a defect and attempted a remedy", p.18
  From "The Cambridge Companion to William Blake" (ed Morris Eaves), CUP, 2003
• "of the ancient poets, every reader feels the mythology tedious and oppressive", Dr Johnson
• "[For Coleridge] All genuine creation ... derives from the generative tension of opponent forces, which are synthesized, without exclusion, in a new whole. The imagination, in creating poetry, therefore echoes the creative principle underlying the universe", "meter turns out to be one of the products of that conflict and resolution of contraries" , "the mirror and the lamp", M.H. Abrams, OUP. 1953, p.119,121
• "Tragedy is primarily an imitation of action, and that it is mainly for the sake of this action that it imitates the personal agents", Aristotle, "Poetics", 6.1450a-b
• "a particular ikon [an aid to devotion] may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ...ikon. They may make it a worse one.", "An Experiment in Criticism", C.S. Lewis, CUP, 1961. p.17
• "Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.", p. 11, "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia", Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 1987
• "after auschwitz, lyric poetry is no longer possible", Adorno
• "Give a man a mask and he will reveal himself", Oscar Wilde
• "No passion in the world is greater than the passion to alter someone else's draft", H.G. Wells
• "one of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another", Larkin, in "Twentieth Century Poetry: Critical Essays and Documents", Martin and Furbank (eds), 1975, p.247.
• "In short, Kristeva prizes poetry for combining both the constative and performative aspects of discourse, which corresponds to the symbolic and semiotic dimensions of the human mind", "Studying Literature", Goring, Hawthorn and Mitchell, Arnold, 2001, p.361
• "The text as airport. Nothing stops here but thousands walk through everyday", Caroline Bergvall, "binary myths" (Andy Brown ed.), p.57.
• "these capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection", "The Mating Mind", Geoffrey Miller, Doubleday, 2000, p.3??
• "I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been", William Empson, "Poetry at the Mermaid".
• "Elegies, childhood reminiscences, ironic anecdotes and holiday-cottage nature poems typify the contents of the average slim volume" - O'Driscoll in "In Black and Gold...", ed C.C. Barfoot, Rtadopi, 1994, p.199
• "The true artist may be best recognised by his acts of omission", Pater, "Appreciations with an Essay on Style", p.18.
• "If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices", Susan Howe.
• "poems are embedded in what are alternately weighty and witty anecdotes that serve to keep the audience more less awake and geared up for their next poetic shot", "Radical Artifice", Marjorie Perloff, 1991, University of Chicago Press, p.78
• "reality, the oppressor's tongue", A Rich
• "a collection of commonplace aphorisms on borrowed stilts", Auden?
• "There are no happy marriages in art - only successful rape", Suzanne Langer
• • p.6 - "They [poets whose works are paraphrased] share the kind of frustration that the scientist undergoes when he sees his work confused with technology and engineering".
  • p.196 - "Artists need not be intelligent; art always is"
  From "Poets, Poems and Movements", T.F. Parkinson, UMI Research Press, 1987.
• "Their attitude toward art in general was somewhat condescending, but, rather like Huxley, the Logical Positivists were perfectly willing to differentiate between the metaphysics they abhorred and works of art, to which they allowed a certain value .", W.V. Harris, "Literary Meaning", Macmillan, 1996, p.71
• • "text comprehension nowadays is devised as a creative endeavour. This naturally lessens the gap between 'usual'/'non-poetic' and 'poetic' reading ... Furthermore, the dependance of the reading process on extratextual information is qualified to explain the phenomenon of found poetry", p.4
  • Strategies for reading poetry include these principles/assumptions: "Optimum Analysis (attention to surface structures); Integration (work is a unified whole, title expected); Subjectivity (free to refer to emotions, speculations and associations); Evaluation (work can be judged); Alternativity/Aestheticalness (non-utilitarian); Assimilation (interpretation regulated by expectation); Accomodation (tolerance of difficulty, etc) ; Generalizing (expected to contain a message); Weak Polyvalence (one meaning per reader) ; Maximum Coherence (readiness to make sense of everything)", p.6
  From "Reader's Strategies in Comprehending Poetic Discourse", P.Begemann in "Approaches to poetry: some aspects of textuality, intertextuality and intermediality", J.Petofi and T.Olivi (eds), Walter de Gruyter, 1994.
• • p.145 - "An assumption is relevant to an individual to the extent that the contextual effects achieved when it is optimally processed are large. An assumption is relevant to an individual to the extent that the effort required to process it optimally is small."
  • p.219 - "whereas a direct answer leaves the hearer free to process the information offered in whatever way he likes, an indirect answer suggests a particular line of processing in the computation of contextual effects. Peter: Is Jack a good sailor? ... Mary: ALL the English are good sailors."
  From "Relevance", D.Sperber and D.Wilson, Blackwell, 1986
• "the poet fabricates linguistic receptivity to the creative desires already abundant in the rich, unconsummated material of reality", "Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice", C. Crow, CUP, 1982, p.44
• "I prefer to read the poems of Wallace Stevens in the Electra typeface that was used for the 1954 Collected Poems ... For me, the experience and the pleasure of reading Steven's poetry are not just intensified by this typeface, they are intimately part of it, so that reading Stevens in another font seems unusual and even disconcerting. This is (I hope) by no means eccentric on my part", "Studying Poetry", S.Matterson and D.Jones, Arnold, 2000, p.157
• Three "sources of inspiration" in art are
  " A direct impression of outward nature, expressed in purely artistic form. This I call an "Impression"
  A largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of inner character, the nonmaterial nature. This I call an "Improvisation"
  An expression of a slowly formed inner feeling, which comes to utterance only after long maturing. This I call a "Composition."
  " From "Uber das Geistige in der Kunst", Kandinsky.
• "Robertson suggests that current fetishizations of the paratactic fragment in avant-garde poetry have thus far 'buttresse[d] foundational opacities which also encrypt symbolically maintained metaphysics of difference'", p.32, Huk in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003
• "Grammar as repressive mechanism, regulates free circulation of meaning (the repression of polysemeity into monosemeity and guided towards a sense of meaning as accumulated, as surplus value of signification)", McCafferty, "Notebooks", p.160
• "[the open text] invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierachies", Lyn Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure", p.272
• "[Forrest-Thompson's] concept of suspended naturalisation - the resistance to that urge to 'reduce the strangeness' - undoubtedly owes its origins to Keats's concept of negative capability, 'when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason", Alison Mark in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003, p.116, (Keats letters, 22 Dec, 1817)
• "In [premature naturalisation's] anxiety to get at the 'meaning' behind the words it would overlook the meaning of the words", Forrest-Thompson, "Poetic Artifice", p.163
• "It seems that in Ireland radical 'content' is permissable only through conventional 'form'", p.164, Trevor Joyce in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003
• "where a traditional voice poem might find itself mired in the devitalised language of consumer culture, or trapped in a formulaic account of inspiration or deep feeling - and where an exemplary language poem might find itself risking an aesthetics of elitism and irrelevancy", p.235, Kathleen Crown in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003
• "the problem of referentiality in capitalistic culture can no longer be understood solely in terms of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism ... The speed of financial speculation, which has transformed the world into a single global day, is fundamentally based on communication and not on production", David Marriot in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003 , p.339
• "[impoverishment is] the single most distinctive feature of schizophrenic language, often manifest[ing] itself in utterances that sound, to many listeners, like 'empty philosophising', 'fruitless intellectualizing' or 'pseudo-abstract reasoning '", John Wilkinson in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003, p.366
• "The empty phrases into which the amateur poet invests his or her feeling are difficult to distinguish from the machine poems of the psychotic - except by their relative linguistic inertia, the dearth of twist or pun.", John Wilkinson in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003, p.369
• "I want to make a case for syntactic and rhetoric effects which have been systematically denigrated in Language writing", Bob Perelman in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003, p.375
• "I want to make the case that contact with familiar social structures in language is a crucial element for politically and poetically ambitious work", Bob Perelman in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003, p.376
• "What the mystified liberal or smug conservative reader sees as engrossing content purveyed through transparent and powerfully harmonic, undissonant language, radical critique sees as the naked balls and chains of ideology, elastic and insidiously self-reproductive", Bob Perelman in "Assembling Alternatives", Romana Huk (ed), Wesleyan Univ Press, 2003, p.377