"Poetry, unlike music, is a meta-art, and relies upon non-physical
structures for the production of its effects. In its case, the medium is
syntax, grammar and logical continuity, which together form the
carrier-wave of plain sense within which its deeper meanings are broadcast.", Don Paterson,
"The empty image: new models of the poetic trope",
"Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience
because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature", Jonathan Culler,
"Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and
the Study of Literature", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p.189
"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
"artworks not only mime nature; they also mime the
accepted modes of miming", Stephen
H. Blackwell,
"The Quill and the Scalpel", Ohio State University Press, 2009, p.88
"art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it", Adorno,""
"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
"So we start with an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to
reward this reader for this additional investment - text that we find
exceptionally suggestive, apposite, or musical - are usually adjudged to be
'poetic'. ... The work of the poet is to contribute a text that will
firstly invite such a reading; and secondly reward such a reading.", Don Paterson,
"The empty image: new models of the poetic trope"
"The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs
and reconstitutes the signified", Jonathan Culler,
"Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and
the Study of Literature", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p.191
"Literature is the question minus the answer", Roland Barthes
"Poetry is language in orbit", Seamus Heaney,
" Sunday Independent", 25 September 1994
"poetry is to be distinguished from the other arts, according to Lessing, Kant,
and Heidegger, by its freedom from intuition and its disavowal of imitation. In effect, poetry renders the world by making illusory and even impossible images of things - by rendering the world as what it is not", Daniel Tiffany,
"Infidel Poetics", Univ of Chicago Press, 2009, p.38
"uniquely, poetry is concerned as much with the
processes and material of language as it is with its use as an efficient
medium of exchange", Richard Bradford,
"Poetry: The Ultimate Guide ", Palgrave Macmillan,
2010, p.3
"poetry is the most versatile, ambidextrous and
omnipotent of all type of speech or writing, yet, paradoxically, it is the
only one which is unified by a single exclusive feature, that which
enables us to identify it and which separates it from every other kind of
linguistic expression. This element is the keystone of my definition of
poetry and it is called 'the double pattern' ... One half of the double
pattern is made up of devices, effects, habits and frames of reference
that poetry shares with all other linguistic discources ... The other half
of the pattern pulls against this, it announces the text as a poem by
marshalling aspects of language into patterns that serve no purpose
elsewhere in language yet which play a role in the way the poem is
structured and, most significantly, in how it discharges meaning.", Richard Bradford,
"Poetry: The Ultimate Guide ", Palgrave Macmillan,
2010, p.25-28
"Poetry is about language. It shows us that language
is brittle, magical, untrustworthy, arbitrary, but unlike a philosophical
essay on such topics, it does not enable us to answer back. It
demonstrates that, on the one hand, language creates it, that
consciousness and language are coterminous but also that we can step
outside it", Richard Bradford,
"Poetry: The Ultimate Guide ", Palgrave Macmillan,
2010, p.261
"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
"[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom", Frost,
"The Figure a Poem
Makes"
"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 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 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 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
"se un branco di musica lascia ancora a un uomo la
possibilità di scegliere tra il ruolo passivo dell'ascoltatore e
quello activo ... un'opera letteraria ... lo destina a un unico ruolo,
quello dell'interprete", (if a piece of music lets the audience
choose between an active and passive role ... the reader of a literary work
is doomed to an interpretive role), Brodskij,
"Dall'esilo", p.50
"[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 exists for us only as long as it is difficult to perceive, as long as we sense the resistance of the material", Jackobson,
"The Newest Russian Poetry", 1921,
"The Acrostick was probably invented about the same Time with the Anagram,
tho' it is impossible to decide whether the Inventor of the one or the
other were the greater Blockhead ", Addison,
"The Spectator", 1711
"the numerical patterning of language in verse encourages creative play with
gaps among the aural, the graphic, and the numerical", David J. Rothman,
"Verse, Prose, Speech, Counting, and the Problem of Graphic Order" in Versification, Vol 1, No. 1, 1997
"poets write in verse partly because it excites what we could call the
numerical imagination, which is both rational and superstitious, quotidian
and magical. Versification is inherently a way of asserting the relatedness
of words and therefore also of things to one another", David J. Rothman,
"Verse, Prose, Speech, Counting, and the Problem of Graphic Order" in Versification, Vol 1, No. 1, 1997
"It can be argued that to invent a verse-form which becomes immortal, living on in the works of future poets and in other languages, is one of the greatest achievements possible for a poet", Martin Lyon,
"Acumen 71 (Sept 2011)", p.71
"Much contemporary 'free-verse' is in fact blank verse", Fiona Sampson,
"Poetry Writing: The expert guide", Robert Hale,
2009, p.41
"Many poetry tutors don't like to discuss [line endings] at all; there is such a taboo on discussing this most personal aspect of poetry", Katy Evans-Bush, in
"Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.194
"Syllabic meter in English is a compelling measure because it is clear, simple, consistent, and regulates phonemic flow, albeit minimally", Rothman, in
"Meter in English: A Critical Engagement", David Baker (ed),
University of Arkansas Press, 1996, (p. 207).
"Personally I have a dread of the sonnet. It must contain 14 lines and a man must be a tremendous poet or a cold mathematician if he can accommodate his thoughts to such a condition", Edward Thomas
"Personally I enjoy writing in a form first, then playing the same set of words through variations of different forms, lengthening the poem, shortening it, until it either 'clicks' into the right form (Robert Frost again), or decides that it wants to be 'free' verse. The move into free verse is always a pleasant surprise for a poem that has passed through so many cages and narrow ways. And such a poem bears the voice-print of strictness and discipline while also appearing to be merely spoken, inevitably, as if improvised on the spot. Your working must never show. Art must conceal art", David Morley
"Form is content-as-arranged; content is form-as-deployed", Helen Vendler
"Can form make the primary chaos ... articulate without depriving it of its capacious vitality, its generative power? Can form go even further than that and actually generate that potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plentitude? In my opinion the answer is yes", Lyn Hejinian in "Moving Borders", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed), Talisman House, 1998, p.622
"Writing's forms are not merely shapes but forces, too; formal questions are about dynamics... Form does not necessarily achieve closure, nor does raw materiality provide openness", Lyn Hejinian in "Moving Borders", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed), Talisman House, 1998, p.618
"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
"we ... have no choice but to write in free verse", Bly, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, Harper and Row, 1990, p.38
"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
"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 regarded not as a neat mould to be filled, but rather as a sieve to catch certain kinds of material", Theodore Roethke,
in "A Poet's Guide to Writing Poetry", Mary Kinzie, p.345
"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")
"La nuova fase della poesia in rete richiede un intervento sulle forme,
dunque, perché le questioni di forma sono questioni di contenuto; e di
nuovi contenuti ha bisogno la poesia in rete" (the new phase of online
poetry demands changes in form, because questions of form are questions of content, and
online poetry needs new content), Valerio
Cuccaroni, "Poesia, Giugno 2010", p.51
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.
"I think that writing prose and writing poetry are so different, you almost use different sides of the brain ... I'd say that prose definitely kills off poetry rather than the other way. Although it depends what kind of prose", Jackie Kay,
"The Poetry Paper", Issue 8
"Gothic novels were strong from 1800-1825, sporting novels seem to run from 1820 to 1860, while imperial romances run from 1850 though 1890, and so on for over 40 genres. What is most interesting, however, is that the genres seem grouped into six periods of creativity and they disappear in clusters as well. Consequently there is an almost complete turn-over in genres every 25 years or so, that is, roughly a generation", Moretti, F.,
"Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary
History", "New Left Review 24" (quoted by William L. Benzon in PsyArt)
"la differenza tra prosa e poesia non viene più
avvertita come quantitativa o tecnica, ma come qualitativa: lo stile
è infatti percepito come prodotto di una sensibilità
particolare e irripetibile", (the difference between prose and
poetry no longer derives from issues of quantity or technique, but of
quality: the style is in fact perceived as a product of a particular and
unrepeatable sensibility), Fiorenza Lipparini,
"L'oscurità nella poesia moderna", in
"Lettere Italiane", LXI, N.2, 2009, p.293
"Prose invents - poetry
discloses", Jack Spicer,
"The Collected books of Jack Spicer, letter", p.15
"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.
"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
"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
"After listening to a piece of music we often feel a sense of satisfaction and understanding. Poetry aims for this as well, but it’s limited by what the words mean, whereas in music, the message is exact and intelligible but without being paraphrasable like language", John Ashbury, The Spectator, February 2103
"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
"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.
"beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", Comte de Lautréamont
"What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth", Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey
"["Beauty is truth, truth beauty"] strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the
reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a
statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it,
however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in
ordinary use. ... The statement of Keats seems to me meaningless: or
perhaps the fact that it is grammatically meaningless conceals another
meaning from me", T.S. Eliot,
"Dante", 1929
"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.
"From Mallarmé onwards, the 'obscurity' of modernist writing challenges tacit assumptions about the nature and function of poetry, eliciting ontological questions about the purity or impurity of the poem in relation to other modes of discourse", Anthony Mellors,
"Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.169
"Some of the most celebrated "difficult" poetry of the past ten years seems to me derivative, mechanical, shallow, soulless, and too clever by half", Stephen Burt,
"Close Call with Nonsense", Graywolf Press, 2009, p.4
"I cambiamenti [verso l'oscurità] sono graduali e riguardano tutti i
livelli del testo, dal lessico, alla metrica ...; dalla sintassi, che
comincia a seguire le onde associative del pennsiero, ai trope",
(the changes [towards obscurity] are gradual and exist at all levels of the
text, from diction, to metre ...; from syntax, which begins to follow the
associative waves of thought, to tropes),
Fiorenza Lipparini,
"L'oscurità nella poesia moderna", in
"Lettere Italiane", LXI, N.2, 2009, p.293
"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
"the damn function of simile, always a displacement of what is happening ... I hate the metaphors", Robert Creeley
"Metonymy moves attention from thing to thing; its principle is combination rather than selection. Compared to metaphor, which depends on code, metonymy preserves context, foregrounds interrelationship. And again in comparison with metaphor, which is based on similarity, and in whicch meanings are conserved and transferred from one thing to something said to be like it, the metonymic is unstable. While metnymy maintains the intactness and discreteness of particulars, its paratactic perspective gives it multiple vanishing points", Lyn Hejinian,
"Poetics Journal", 8, 1989
"One can sum up modern poetic technique by calling it the rediscovery of metaphor and the full commitment to metaphor. The poet can legitimately step out into the universal only by first going through the narrow door of the particular ... Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks not saying it at all. but the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether", Cleanth Brooks,
"Irony as a Principle of Structure"
"Metaphor is the whole of poetry. ... Poetry is simply made of metaphor ... Every poem is a new metaphor inside or it is nothing"
, Frost
"Poets coin new metaphors that either reveal underlying mappings in existing
conceptual metaphors, or - more often - they innovate new conceptual
mappings, their metaphorical turns of phrase being both a surface form and
a declaration of a deeper conceptual one ... As a rule, metaphors based on
primary connotations of the vehicle need not declare their ground;
metaphors based on secondary connotations generally have to", Don Paterson,
"The empty image: new models of the poetic trope",
"The ground is not merely the declaration of a shared attribute; the ground
opens up a conduit whereby the tenor can be infected with aspects of the
vehicle; it is therefore an active field, and directs sense from the
vehicle towards the tenor, presenting an original and dynamic conceptual
blend.", Don Paterson,
"The empty image: new models of the poetic trope",
"As a rule, the comparison should be close enough to the poem's concerns to
appear to the reader as natural enough to draw on its argumentative or
thematic circuitry, and distant enough to arrest the reader within its
felicity and originality, without breaking the spell of the poem.", Don Paterson,
"The empty image: new models of the poetic trope",
"But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception", Aristotle, "The Poetics"
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
"No one should fear that the contemplation of signs will lead us away from the things in themselves; on the contrary it leads into the interior of things", Leibniz,
"letter to Tschirnhaus"
"The fundamental principle of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign does not prevent us from distinguishing in any language between what is intrinsically arbitrary - that is, unmotivated - and what is only relatively arbitrary. Not all signs are absolutely arbitrary. In some cases, there are factors which allow us to recognize different degrees of arbitrariness, although never to discard the notion entirely. The sign may be motivated to a certain extent", Saussure, "Course in General Linguistics", (trans. Roy Harris). London, 1983, p.130
"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.
"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it", Samuel Johnson
"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
"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.
"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
"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
"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.
"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
"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
"In the human voice, the vowel carries the bulk of the
feeling in its complex tonal 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
"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
"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", Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", chapter 9
(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
"Epistemology and theories of language ... have become as central to contemporary lyric as psychoanalysis in the later 1950s, myth and politics in the late '60s", Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense, p.346
"in late antiquity, [...] stress replaced length as a salient feature of European speech and [...] meters based on accent and/or fixed syllable count eventually supplanted the quantitative meters of classical poetry (Another such transformation occurred in the wake of the Norman Conquest, when, along with other developments, the flexional forms of Old English broke down under the influence of French, and the largely falling rhythms of Anglo-Saxon prosody gave way to the principally rising rhythms of Middle and Modern English verse)", Timothy Steele,
"Able Muse Anthology", 2010, p.xiv
"the appearance of prepositions, conjunctions and verbs at the end of lines
has a purpose: to increase the language's fluidity and that sense of
recreated feeling", Will Daunt,
"Envoi", issue 150
"the language of poetry is the language of paradox", Cleanth Brooks,
"The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of
Poetry", Harcourt Brace, 1947, p.3
"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
"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
"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
"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
"[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
"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
"[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
"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.
"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
"The words to be rhymed should not only sound alike but they should enrich and deepen and enlarge each other", Wallace Stevens,
"letter to Elsie Moll", 1909
"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
"When he found his voice [Berryman] found his voices" , Louise Gluck
"The essential criterion of difference between a poem by
Stevie Smith and one by W. H. Auden is ultimately a difference of
personality, irrespective of literary theory. This is self-evident. It is
also true of poems written by poets who tell us they deny the voice - all
you hear is their voice",
AC Evans,
The Argotist Online
"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 lyric genre is] a most compressed and lovely
thing ... the highest form", Susan Howe,
"The Birth-mark", 1993, p.171
"By the 1990s, with the rise of feminist, Marxist, and
poststructuralist theories, American poets were becoming self-conscious
about the ideological implications of their medium, particularly lyric
poetry's participation in upholding a patriarchal tradition and a belief in
the "transcendental signified" ... Mark Jeffreys outlines various
contemporary anxieties over and hopes for the lyric, noting that this
materialist opposition comes from a perception of lyric's 'imperial
assertion of self, the programmatic exclusion of otherness or difference,
and the logocentric quest for
presence'", Paul Otremba, in "American Poets in the 21st Century", Clauda Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan Univ Press, 2007, p.55-56
"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
"Typographic isolation does not "emphasize"; it frames, rendering a familiar word or phrase momentarily unfamiliar ... Emphasis limits the range of possible meanings", Stephen Cushman,
"William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure", Yale, p.60
"The early printers always marked their paragraphs, usually with the paragraph sign [] hand-drawn in red. A space was left for the sign. Often it was never drawn in and before long the space alone was sufficient to mark the paragraph", Jan Tschichold, "Asymmetric Typography, Reinhold, 1967, p.48
"The early avant-garde's play with poetic language as visual art grasped the change in poetic emphasis from aural to visual with the ascendency of free verse, and, further, moved poetry from weight on metaphor to emphasis on the material world, trying to put some physicality onto the poetry ... The influence of Cubism and Dadaism encouraged poets to see the page as verbal collage, and led to rediscovering Greek patterned poetry", Carol Ann Johnston, "APR", 2010, V39.3, p.45
"Typographical intervention, whether in the
orthography of speech or in the shape of the page, comes to represent a
devolution of authorial power that prefigures the devolution which was to
be achieved in the second referendum of
1997", Cairns Craig,
"Devolving the Scottish Novel", in "A Concise
Companion to Contemporary British Fiction", ed James F. English), 2006, p.137
"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
"Many of the older typefaces have historic
contexts. Using a particular typeface can therefore add a subtle extra
dimension to a book. The first edition of Edwin Morgan's Sonnets from
Scotland for example was set in Scotch Roman ... Setting such a book
in a distinctly English face, such as Caslon, for instance, would seem
inappropriate unless you were doing it very deliberately to make an ironic point", Gerry Cambridge, "Sphinx",
Issue 12, p.45
"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
"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 Paterson, "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
"The poem and the essay are more intimately related than any two genres, because they're both ways of pursuing problems, or maybe trying to solve problems", David Shields,
"Reality Hunger", Penguin, 2010, p.202
"All great works of literature either dissolve a genre
or invent one", Walter Benjamin
"The major modernists tended to write as a matter of course in multiple major genres - but are most often remembered for work in a single genre", Lee Upton, "Southwest Review", 94.3
"genres bear within them accumulated tensions that school their practitioners and that create both predictable and unpredictable effects, given different contexts and different audiences. The pleasure of breaking style or breaking out of genre or blending or warping generic conventions lies in the realization of the events that transpire through the act of summoning the genre's leading features", Lee Upton, "Southwest Review", 94.3
"Every genre positions those who participate in a text
of that kind: as interviewer or interviewee, as listener or storyteller, as
a reader or a writer, as a person interested in political matters, as
someone to be instructed or as someone who instructs; each of these
positionings implies different possibilities for response and for
action. Each written text provides a 'reading position' for readers, a
position constructed by the writer for the 'ideal reader' of the
text", Gunther Kress
, Communication and Culture: An Introduction, New
South Wales University Press, 1988, p. 107
"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".
"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
"of the ancient poets, every reader feels the mythology tedious and oppressive",
Dr Johnson
"the goals of the epic and the saga modes are not always mutually exclusive -what's at stake for the epic is its culture's story of itself, its explanatory and enabling narrative "the tale of the tribe" ... the aims of a saga are less easily summarised except negatively: in being about genealogy (the spread of generations and their interactions and dispersal) rather than lineage (the validation of inherited rights or proof or lack thereof) it has multiple focal points", Hejinian, "The Grand Piano: Part 6", 2008, Florida, 1999, p.38
"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
"In academic circles all evaluation is seen as a
conspiracy to dominate via the articulation of
criteria", Myers and Hedeen,
"Unrelenting Readers", Story Line Press, 2004, p.18
"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
"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
"Listen carefully to first criticisms of your
work. Note carefully just what it is about your work that the critics don't
like - then cultivate it. That's the part of your work that's individual and
worth keeping", Jean Cocteau
"Look for self-analyses or for frame-breaking moments when the poem stops to tell you what it describes", Stephen Burt,
"Close Call with Nonsense", Graywolf Press, 2009, p.11
"In general, editors constantly crave prose, while they have more poems than they know what to do with", David Yezzi,
"The Rest Is Criticism", "Contemporary Poetry Review", Nov 2010
"[I]t's very hard for us, for me, to get over the
desire for this elegant, seamless, logical discourse when writing
criticism, because for one thing it has real power. People all of a sudden
start to listen to what you say", Charles Bernstein,
"Content's Dream", p.447
"For a few years [mid 1950s] there was a climate in both England and America in which literary criticism could make claims for intellectual centrality", Bernard Bergonzi, "Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture", OUP 1991
"by the 1950s, the imperial role of criticism had become almost commonplace. 'English' paraded its claims to be considered a kind of presiding discipline in the increasingly specialized universities, and the literary critic figured as the very model of the modern general intellectual", Stefan Collini, "Common Reading", OUP, 2008, p.258
"One of the hellish things you learn after ten years
working in editing - I hardly dare confess this - is that you can hold a
poem a yard away, and without having read a word know there's a 99% chance
that you won't like it. Most often this is because any random two- or
three-line passage appears to contain all the letters of the alphabet", Don Paterson,
"???"
"some creative writers are superior to others solely
because their critical faculty is superior", TS
Eliot,
"The Function of Criticism"
"If you are working honestly as a critic, then there is
an excellent chance - I would go so far as to say it is unavoidable - that you are going to piss somebody off.", David Yezzi,
"The Rest Is Criticism", "Contemporary Poetry
Review", Nov 2010
"It is not too much to say that Principles of Literary Criticism, which I.A. Richards published in 1924, contained a programme of critical work for a generation", Raymond Williams, "Culture and Society", Penguin, 1961, p.239
"Literary criticism ... takes as its subject matter,
not a text, but the transaction between a reader and a
text", Norman Holland, "Five Readers Reading", New Haven, 1975, p.248
"Criticism usually ignores boredom", Jonathan Culler,
"Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and
the Study of Literature", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p.306
"Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or
another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and
inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building
of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have
theories of its rise, height, decline and fall - which latter, it would
seem, is now near, among all people", Thomas Carlyle
,
"Signs of the Times", 1829
"Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling
produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never
be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the
second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is
emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere
and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about
style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of
books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly
dull jargon", D.H. Lawrence,
"Phoenix", 1936
"The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it", D.H. Lawrence,
"Studies in Classic American Literature", Mercury Books, 1965, p. 2
"Now creative writing has taken the place of theory", Julia Bell, "Times Higher Education", 10th July, 2008, p.40
"Like thatching or clog dancing, literary criticism
seems to be something of a dying art", Terry Eagleton,
"How to Read a Poem",2007, p.1
"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
"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
"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
"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
"Romanticism is intensity, and its watchword is 'Imagination'", Drabble,
"Oxford Companion to English Literature", 5th ed, 1985, p.843
"Juxtaposition can also be seen as a version of the reconsiliation of opposites so important to the Romantics",
Cole Swenson, in "American Poets in the 21st Century", Clauda Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan Univ Press, 2007, p.110
"English Romantics - man as a natural being in a natural world, informed by
intense introspection and a belief in the stability and sovereignty of the
individual
", Cole Swensen,
"American Hybrid:
A Norton Anthology of New Poetry", W. W. Norton, 2009
"[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
"Surrealist poetry extends a tendency traced in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French verse of making levels of figuration (what is literal, what metaphorical? etc.) increasing hard to decide", Timothy Clark,
"The Theory of Inspiration", Manchester UP, 1997, p.209
"SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations", Andre Breton, "Le Manifeste du Surréalisme", 1924.
"Surrealism has undertaken to realize, through an artistic movement, the
spiritual intentions of Dadaism", Huelsenbeck,
"Courier dada", 1958, p.72
"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
"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"
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',
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"
"The Formalists were excited by the collisions of different genres and styles ... Nevertheless it should be stressed that the focus of Formalist analysis remains upon the literary, and the relationship between form and content is a difficult area for Formalist theory", Rick Rylance,
"Debating Texts", OUP, 1987, p.35
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
"If nothing else, Oulipian techniques might provide, at last, a shared language of form within which the mainstream and experimental camps can continue to wage their wars of attrition", Simon Turner, in
"Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.130
"The Oulipians have very much arrived, and their presence on the scene could well prove to have a profound effect upon our long-held conceptions of literary form, potentially and irrevocably altering the course of contemporary British poetry", Simon Turner, in
"Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.116
"Precisely because the author is made aware of
constraints, he or she must find, within language, resources that would
otherwise not be found", Joseph Tabbi,
"Poetics Today", 31:1, p.48
"Constraints are not ornaments: for the writer, they
help generate the text; for the reader, they help make sense of it", Baetens and Poucel,
"Poetics Today", 30:4, p.613
"Once we recognize that the frenetic drive to innovate
via revolt has bankrupted so many twentieth-century avant-gardes, it is
not surprising that we should now encounter a broad upsurge in
constraint-based art", Baetens and
Poucel,
"Poetics Today", 30:4, p.622
"the conversion of the active reader into a writer is
certainly one of the major consequences of constrained writing", Baetens and
Poucel,
"Poetics Today", 30:4, p.623
"authors and readers of constrained writing have a
strong predilection to work in groups", Baetens and
Poucel,
"Poetics Today", 30:4, p.624
"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 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 Critical explication was fundamentally a teaching
method, one that tended to exclude as 'anti-poetry' whatever it couldn't
neatly unfold in under an hour", Joseph M. Conte,
"Unending Design", Cornell University Press, 1991
"the key points is that [New Criticism] grew out of their practical interest in writing poetry ... founded upon the sort of technical discussion of poetic problems that would occur among a group of poets", Myers,
"The Elephants Teach", Prentice Hall, 1996, p.130
"The New Criticism was caricatured as an extension of technological domination, explication being now seen as at best an evasive activity, at worst a form of manipulation", Graff, "Professing Literature", Univ of Chicago Press, 1987, p.240
"The ideal poem in New Critical terms was self-contained, refined,
precisely formed, detached, and difficult in the sense that it required,
and rewarded, careful study", Cole Swensen,
"American Hybrid:
A Norton Anthology of New Poetry", W. W. Norton, 2009
"lyric became a metaphor for the New Criticism [and its
reactionary ideology]", Virginia
Jackson, "Dickenson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric
Reading", Princeton UP, 2005, p.93
"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 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
"oddly, the last people in the humanities who are still talking about 'absolute truth' are the Post-Structuralists in the business of demolishing it", Alan Bilton,
"An Introduction to Contemprary American Fiction" Edinburgh University Press, 2002, p.11
"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.
"The key difference between structuralism and poststructuralism is located in the latter's more radical extension of Saussurean linguistic theory. Structuralism recognised [that signifieds' ] relationship with their signifiers [was] arbitrary. However, once this relationship has been fixed in language, signifier and signified become defined and stable. Poststructuralism denies that stability of this kind is possible", Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.181
"Deconstruction can be seen as poststructuralism at its most radical", Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.181
"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
"Late modernist texts remain true to the modernist imperative that eclecticism and difficulty form a hermeneutic basis for cultural renewal, but their belatedness involves a disavowal of the unifying and totalising gestures of modernist aesthetics", Anthony Mellors,
"Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.2
"The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of the discipline to criticize the discipline itself - not in order to subvert t, but to enrich it more firmly in its area of competence", Clement Greenberg
"the effort, through art, to recognise that which will fit into no system, no story, that which resolutely refuses to be turned into art ... is at the heart of the Modernist enterprise", Gabriel Josipovici,
"What ever happened to modernism", Yale, 2010, p.113
"Modernism is a response to simplifications of the self and of life which Protestantism and the Enlightenment brought with them
", Gabriel Josipovici,
"What ever happened to modernism", Yale, 2010, p.153
"to be modern is to know that which is not possible any more ", Barthes
"[High Modernism's experiments] "share a common
denominator: presentation of direct objects and experience, in free verse,
without interpretation, in short units", Kevin Walzer,
"The Ghost of Tradition", Story Line Press, 1998, p.25
"[in retraining] the poetry reader away from the old
joys of memory and sentiment and song, the secondary modernist project cut
deep into the root and sap of the art ... a centuries old, bright
partnership between poet and reader has been injured. An ancient trust has
been hurt", Eavan Boland,
"The Wrong Way" (Herbert and Hollis (eds))
"Modernism and, more specifically, Modernist poetry
represent the terminus of literary history. All subsequent and forthcoming
development - postmodernism included - are extensions, mergers or
revivals of established Modernist and pre-Modernist precedents ", Richard Bradford,
"Poetry: The Ultimate Guide ", Palgrave Macmillan,
2010, p.120
"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
"[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
"The only place where the postmodern is extant is in children's cartoons like Shrek and The Incredibles ... Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text ... Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual's action the necessary condition of the cultural product. ... Those born before 1980 may see, not the people, but contemporary texts which are alternately violent, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, consumerist, meaningless and brainless ... The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. ... In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. ... This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance ", Alan Kirby,
"The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond", Philosophy Now, May/Jun 2012
"Post-Modernism's error was to suggest that if you could just change the imagery, create familiarity and make people laugh, somehow the deeper cultural malaise would be cured.", Patrick Hannay,
"Times Higher Education", 22 September 2011
"For many researchers working in humanities
departments, the cry is now: Postmodernism is dead, long live
Modernism!", Andrew Thacker,
"The Times Higher Education", 11th Aug 2011, p.41
"post-modernism ... has revolutionized the world of the visual arts (including film) while poetry has (arguably, at least in its mainstream manifestations) remained virtually untouched", Adam Fieled, in
"Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.33
"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
""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
"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.
"Concrete poetry begins by assuming a total
responsibility before language: accepting the premise of the historical
idiom as the indispensable nucleus of communication, it refuses to absorb
words as mere indifferent vehicles, without life, without personality
without history - taboo-tombs in which convention insists on burying the
idea",
Brazilian concrete poetry manifesto, 1958
"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
"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
"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
"Ever since it first raised its ugly head I have hated Language
Poetry. It is dehumanized, aggressive and opportunistic. Far from being an
extremist poetry it is an abnegation of poetry itself.", Peter Riley,
"Fortnightly Review", September 2012
"Language poetry can be defined as self-referential and self-conscious, placing it clearly in the line of transition from modernism to postmodernism", Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.101
"Language poetry ... seems to have nourished poetic practice in marked nondenominational ways.", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations", Univ of Alabama Press, 2004, p.24
"Rather than asserting poetry's traditional alignment with the individual's creation and experience of beauty, the Language poets stress its capacity to inspire critical thought about culture, ideology and community. This emphasis does not mean a rejection of intimacy or response",
Kimberly Lamm, in "American Poets in the 21st Century", Clauda Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan Univ Press, 2007,
p.136
"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
"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
"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
"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 school 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
"[The Elliptical poets] broke up syntax, but reassembled it; they tried (as had [Jory] Graham) to adapt Language poets' disruptions to traditional lyric goals (expressing a self and its feelings), and tried (as Graham did not) to keep their poems short, song-like or visually vivid", Stephen Burt,
"Close Call with Nonsense", Graywolf Press, 2009, p.10
"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
"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-consciousness, 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
"[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
"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.
"Truly original works are vulnerable, because
they have to abandon something that is supposed to be there. Rhyme, for
instance. That used to be a bugbear for the anti-free-versers! Today it
might be absence of meaning - a criticism aimed at the abstractionists by
the lyrical realists. This need to abandon some accepted rule in order to
make something new accounts for originality's vulnerability, and is why
Cummings, Sitwell and Vachel Lindsey are still distrusted by a myopic
establishment. The abstractionists, for their part, have set up their own
taboos - narrative and signification, for instance", Anthony
Howell,
"Fortnightly Review", September 2012
"contemporary culture is a "culture of avant-gardes." ... because every avant-garde is the negation of a previous avant-garde", Umberto Eco,
"Form as Social Commitment", p.142
"Every time an artist invents a new form that involves a profound change in the vision of the world, he is immediately imitated by a legion of pseudo-artists who borrow the form of his art without, however, understanding its implications.", Umberto Eco,
"Form as Social Commitment", p.142
"a worn out, alienating form of expression can be negated in one of two ways: one can dismantle the modes of communication on which it is based, or one can exorcise them via parody. Parody and irony can thus be seen as viable, subtler alternatives to the more common, revolutionary ardor of the avant-garde. There is also a very dangerous, but plausible, third possibility: one can adopt the communicative forms of a particular system in order to question and challenge that very system", Umberto Eco, "Form as Social Commitment", p.142
"They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to the conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look around for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title", Wordsworth,
"Lyrical Ballads"
"You can always recognize the pioneers by the number of
arrows in their backs", Nicholas Perricone
"the birth of a poet is always a threat to the
existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of
literary castes to reach the center",
Salvatore Quasimodo
"Gay men growing up in the mid-century in Scotland necessarily found tricks of concealment, and the 'avant-garde' offered an environment in which creativity could be engaged in without too much awkward self-revelation and without having to decide exactly how serious one was about what one was writing", D.M.Black,
"The Dark Horse", 26, Winter/Spring 2011, p.74
"When traditional means of introducing motifs are debunked during the development of new schools of poetry, of the two kinds of motivation used by the old school (the traditional and the realistic) only the realistic remains after the traditional declines. This is why any literary school which opposes an older aesthetic always produces manifestoes in one form or another about 'faithfulness to life'", Boris Tomashevsky,
"Thematics"
"So, while poetry attempts to convey something beyond what is conveyed in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one person talking to another ... Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself to be, a return to common speech", Eliot,
"The Music of Poetry", 1942
"Committed to the integration of poetic, philosophic,
and social experiment, the Athenaeum group was, essentially, the first
European avante-garde", Daniel Tiffany,
"Infidel Poetics", Univ of Chicago Press, 2009, p.28
"Historically the avant-garde is the heir to the aristocratic coterie or court circle of artists and intellectuals. But whereas the aristocratic coterie of medieval and Renaissance times had no commitment except to itself and posterity and consequently felt free to cultivate the disinterested pursuit of art and ideas apart from the rest of society, history has imposed upon the modern avant-garde the duty not only of disinterestedly cultivating art and ideas but of educating and leading an aimless body of philistine taste and opinion.
", ,
"The Fate of the Avant-Garde", Partisan Review, 1957
"Publishing categories become literary movements when
the control shifts to the critical conversation among readers", Orson Scott Card,
"Nebula Awards Showcase 2008", Ben Bova (ed),
Penguin 2008, p.232
"as far as I can determine, there hasn't been a new
kind of science fiction since the late 1970s", Orson Scott Card,
"Nebula Awards Showcase 2008", Ben Bova (ed),
Penguin 2008, p.236
"A literary movement can die by dissolving its
boundaries; it doesn't have to be killed", Orson Scott Card,
"Nebula Awards Showcase 2008", Ben Bova (ed),
Penguin 2008, p.237
"[from 1960] the poetic avant-garde was
drawn into the mainstream of American literary life: since then there has
been no avant-garde, though there have been poseurs", Robert von Hallberg,
"American Poetry and
Culture 15", p.13
The twentieth-century avant-garde liked to embrace boredom as a way of getting round what is considered to be the vapid 'excitement' of popular culture", Kenneth Goldsmith, in "American Poets in the 21st Century", Clauda Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan Univ Press, 2007, p.362
"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
"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
"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
"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
"The idea of a coincidence that is not perceived by the characters whom it affects often intrigues novelists", John Mullan, "how novels work", Oxford UP, 2006, p.281
"In general, paragraphs have become short in novels over the last century", John Mullan, "how novels work", Oxford UP, 2006, p.226
"the first person, in the long piece, is a form doomed to looseness", Henry James, "The Ambassadors", (preface)
"a majority of literary novels published in the last couple of decades have been written in the first person", David Lodge, "Consciousness and the Novel", Penguin 2002, p.86
"Before the nineteenth century, novelists had little interest in dialect speakers, except to mark them off as comically foolish", John Mullan, "how novels work", Oxford UP, 2006, p.131
"Satire does not always like easily within novels. The mockery of vice and folly can thwart the very extension of sympathy to characters that is often the aim of novelists", John Mullan, "how novels work", Oxford UP, 2006, p.115
"A novel is (1) lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5) protagonist. Everything that the novel is and does, every effect that the novel has had on, first, Western culture, and subsequently, world culture, grows out of these five small facts that apply to every novel ... If any of them is missing, the literary form in question is not a novel", Jane Smiley,
"13 Ways of Looking at the Novel", Faber and Faber, 2006, p.14
"The short story is quite a baffling form, very difficult, the form where you fail the most", Helen Dunmore,
"The Poetry Paper", Issue 8
"Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses
space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and
presents what is outside in a new way. This is the nearest I can come to
explaining what a story does for me, and what I want my stories to do for
other people", Alice Munro,
"What is Real"
"Nothing is more definite, complete and single-minded
than the ending of a detective story. It is less a resolution than an
erasure", Susan E. Sweeney,
"The Cunning Craft", (ed Walker and Frazer),
Western Illinois Univ Press, 1990
"Few novelists have been unsophisticated enough to declare an allegiance to beauty - the twientieth century was too ironical an age for that - but for beauty they have substituted other sorts of formal integrity that are perhaps more distancing or off-putting than beauty but serve the same purpose of making the novel cohesive and self-referential
", Jane Smiley,
"13 Ways of Looking at the Novel", Faber and Faber, 2006, p.147
"For many generations, the novel had no pretensions to art", Jane Smiley,
"13 Ways of Looking at the Novel", Faber and Faber, 2006, p.128
"novelists, in the company of their characters, are never quite alone, which might preserve many of them from the suicidal impulses that often overtake poets", Jane Smiley,
"13 Ways of Looking at the Novel", Faber and Faber, 2006, p.42
"the most important essential characteristic of the novel that arises out of its structure, out of the combination of narrative and length, is that it is inherently political", Jane Smiley,
"13 Ways of Looking at the Novel", Faber and Faber, 2006, p.24
"Serious nonfiction removes fiction's masks, stripping away monuments to civilisation to arrive at truths that destroy the writer and thereby encompass the reader - the last shred of human expression before silence seizes all words", David Shields,
"Reality Hunger", Penguin, 2010, p.149
"Perhaps more than any other form of fiction, science fiction
abounds in examples of writers working together on an individual work - ...
in shared-world books or in novels in which a successful senior author works with a junior partner", Darren Harris-Fain,
"Understanding Contemporary Science Fiction", Univ of South Carolina Press, 2005, p.122
"When reading an eighteenth century novel we speed up and slow down, and the rhythm of our reading is a recognition of structure: we pass quickly through those descriptions and conversations whose functions identify; we wait for something more important, at which we slow down ... With a modern text that we cannot organise as the adventures of a character, we cannot skip and modulate our speed in the same way", Jonathan Culler,
"Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and
the Study of Literature", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p.306
"Brigid Brophy's In Transit (1969) posed a fundamental challenge to conventional modes of characterisation and narrative progression: the gender of her central character remains undefined throughout a novel that presents two alternative conclusions, printed side by side on the page in double columns", Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.88
"The unprecedented and unrepeated growth of the magazine
industry, which underpinned the growth and popularity of the short
story genre, was the catalyst, if not the source of twentieth-century critical
dismissal of the form", Sarah Whitehead,
"Reader as consumer: the magazine short story" in "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1", 2010, p.79
"The growth of the magazine industry at the turn of the nineteenth into
the twentieth century maps the most important chapter in the history of the
short story and has directly influenced the nature of the form as it exists today ... The magazine story has imbued the short story genre as a whole with the
value of the disposable, the appeal of the marginalized and the inexorable link
between literature and consumer culture", Sarah Whitehead,
"Reader as consumer: the magazine short story" in "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1", 2010, p.82
"I propose that ... microfictions are [] small, and subtle, epiphanies ... reached not by some narrative trick, but by a realisation that the moment depicted in the microfiction has changed everything, that there has been a shift in what the reader believed or expected, and that this has had significance", Howitt-Dring, H. ,
"Making micro meanings: reading and writing microfiction" in "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1", 2010, p.54
"Because microfiction could be viewed as stories working solely by implication, I feel that they have been mistrusted and sidelined in literature.
", Howitt-Dring, H. ,
"Making micro meanings: reading and writing microfiction" in "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1", 2010, p.56
"Stealing poetic techniques, truncating those of prose, it seems like the offspring of some ill-fated alliance, but in fact microfiction uses the best parts of both genres and is a genre in its own right, as it functions and speaks in a new and different way to both.", Howitt-Dring, H. ,
"Making micro meanings: reading and writing microfiction" in "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1", 2010, p.57
"The Novel is a moral form. It's about cause and effect", Anne Enright,
"BBC R4 interview", 2011
"I suggest that the internal tension in the heart of every story between the theme and the plot constitutes, after all, its chief resemblance to life. ... In real life, as in a story, something must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied", C.S. Lewis,
"On Stories"
"A short story has to choose between being either an anecdote or a picture and can but play its part strictly according to its kind. I rejoice in the anecdote, but I revel in the picture", Henry James,
"New York Editions", preface to V.10
"We may safely generalize that short story writers, as a class, from Poe to Paley, incline to see how much they can leave out, and novelists as a class, from Petronius to Pynchon, how much they can leave in", John Barth,
""
"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them", Ernest Hemingway,
""
"[The short story and the novel] are very discontinuous. For me, they each bear greatly different relations to time. The novel, I think, has a mimetic relation to time. The novel simulates the flow of time, so once you get very far into a novel, you forget where you began - just as you do in real time. Whereas with a short story the point is not to forget the beginning. The ending only makes sense if you can remember the beginning.", Russell Banks,
"The Paris Review", 1998
" unlike the novel, the short story is invariably
literary", Joyce Carol Oates,
"New York
Review of Books", June 29
"[the] well-written short story is not suited to the sound bite culture: it's too dense; its effects are too complex for easy digestion", William Boyd,
""
"that is often how novels are read, fifteen minutes at a time. You can't read stories that way", Lorrie Moore,
"The Paris Review", 2001
"the short form is particularly adept at exploring the
dynamic between narrative and the urban environment. Short stories have a
long tradition of depicting encounters between strangers. This intermixing
invariably happens in municipal public
space", Jim Hinks,
"ReBerth", Comma Press, 2008
"One of the best known, and one of the least
intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western
European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative
absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that
name",
George Saintsbury, "The English Novel",
chapter 1
"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
"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)
"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
"during the nineteenth century, the novel became more
painterly", James Wood,
"How Fiction Works", Vintage, 2009, p.62
"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 ridicule 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, quite 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
"in poetry the music comes first, before everything else, everything else: until the poem has found its music, it's merely verbal matter, information", C. K. Williams, "The Threepenny Review", Spring 2010
"I must confess ... my utter failure with music. I'm sorry to say it but it's true. Maybe there's something wrong with my ears. I can't listen to music, especially classical music, except with pained bewilderment. I've never been to a concert, or even played a classical CD right through", Kathleen Jamie, "New Statesman", 25 October 2007
"Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds ... The concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in smaller doses and flay me in larger ones", Nabokov
"Writing poetry is a musical thing, primarily. It's not about an idea that pre-exists. I mean, you don't find, in my experience, a subject matter and then you versify images around that subject matter. It's a musical thing. It happens in the inner ear. Words start accumulating their own music and, eventually, their own subject matter", Conor O'Callaghan
"Pound and Stevens ... became
for poetry what Picasso and Mondrian were to painting", Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, Charles Altieri, CUP, 1989, p.10,
"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", "Wallace Stevens and Modern
Art", Glen MacLeod, Yale U.P., 1993, p.73
"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.
"Many creative writers have been myopic (Keats,
Tennyson). Shelley was long-sighted. 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.
"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.
"In his 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads ... William Wordsworth replaced the traditional generic opposition between poetry and prose with that between poetry and science", Britta Martens,
"Times Higher Education", 31st Jan 2013
"Any distinctive language interests me, whether it's that of football or knitting, but scientific language is very beautiful. Each word opens a world. And scientists need metaphor to describe things that they don't fully understand yet.", Jo Shapcott,
"The Guardian", 24th July 2010
"Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred;
without Science, we should always worship false gods",
W. H. Auden, "The Dyer's
Hand", p. 62
"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
"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
"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, as anyone who's ever tried it knows, is a profoundly lonely
pursuit. It's something that happens in the private space between the
writer and language", Robin Behn and Chase
Twichell (eds),
"The Practice of Poetry", 2001, Quill/HarperResource, p.xvii
"Every attempt to socialize writing and reading fails; poetry is a solitary art, more now than ever, and its proper audience is the deeply educated, solitary reader, or that reader's sitting within herself in a theater", Harold Bloom
"The poetry pf hit count trebles in
February, on the run up
to Valentine's
Day", Anne Stewart,
"Acumen", May 2010, p.37
"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 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 ",
"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.
"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.
"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
"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).
"Don't write about what you know - write about what you're interested in. Don't write about yourself - you aren't as interesting as you think", Tracy Chevalier,
"Her FAQ"
"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
"One could persuasively argue that in America the most influential theory of literature since World War II has been creative writing", RM Berry,
"Theory, Creative Writing and the Impertinence of History", in "Colors of a Different House" (ed Bishop and Ostrom) NCTE (USA),
1994, p.57
"A significant difference between the poetry culture of the United States and that of the United Kingdom is that work regarded as Other to the Mainstream, in the UK, never receives established prizes.", Carrie Etter,
"Infinite Difference", Shearsman, 2010
"Every American poet feels that the whole
responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that
he is a literary aristocracy of one",
W. H. Auden, " The Dyer's Hand", p. 367
"Hecht's strengths - seriousness, intelligence, formal discipline - are all rare in American poetry", Adam Kirsch, "The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry", Norton, 2008
"American poetry finds itself at a
moment when idiosyncrasy rules to such a degree and differences are so
numerous that distinct factions are hard, even impossible, to pin down ... The product of contradictory traditions, today's writers
often take aspects from two or more to create poetry that is truly
postmodern in that it's an unpredictable and unprecedented mix ... Today's hybrid poem might engage such conventional approaches as narrative
that presumes a stable first-person, yet complicate it by disrupting the
linear temporal path or by scrambling the normal syntactical sequence. Or
it might foreground recognizably experimental modes such as illogicality or
fragmentation, yet follow the strict formal rules of a sonnet or a
villanelle. Or it might be composed entirely of neologisms but based in
ancient traditions. Considering the traits associated with "conventional"
work, such as coherence, linearity, formal clarity, narrative, firm
closure, symbolic resonance, and stable voice, and those generally assumed
of "experimental" work, such as non-linearity, juxtaposition, rupture,
fragmentation, immanence, multiple perspective, open form, and resistance
to closure, hybrid poets access a wealth of tools
", Cole Swensen,
"American Hybrid:
A Norton Anthology of New Poetry", W. W. Norton, 2009
"[US poetry derives from] "English Romantics - man as a natural being in a natural world, informed by
intense introspection and a belief in the stability and sovereignty of the
individual" [or the French] - "Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme - Rimbaud captured in the simple
statement, "We must be absolutely modern," which refused sentimentality as
much as his "I is an other,"
", Cole Swensen,
"American Hybrid:
A Norton Anthology of New Poetry", W. W. Norton, 2009
"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
"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
"An unintended consequence of the recent interest in formalism - and perhaps, too, of the patronage system that can arise all too easily in a writing workshop culture - is the caution audible in some contemporary verse ... there are some striking echoes, in some of today's writing, of the Georgian moment in early twentieth-century verse. ... A century later, recalibration in the similarly overwhelming era of globalization has given us Don Paterson, and those of his peers who favour thrilling clarity over a loose and rather risky grandiosity. But it also seems to have left us with the oxymoronic concept of a cool poetry, limited in affect and range", Fiona Sampson,
"Beyond the Lyric", Chatto and Windus, 2012, p.246
"'Common sense', which confines thought and imagination to what is already familiar, has often demanded that British verse stick to a lyric, realist brief, and decried experiment as pretentious or obfuscatory", Fiona Sampson,
"Beyond the Lyric", Chatto and Windus, 2012, p.76
"English poetry must appear to foreigners, if they possess literary culture, as one where people have forgotten how to express their feelings; where the linguistic arena is so fraught with mutual hostility that everyone is scared to speak subjectively; and every verbal gesture is a displacement activity", Andrew Duncan,
The Council of Heresy, Shearsman, 2009, p.329
"Britain did not know an avant-garde because the vital currents which produced it in a few European countries flowed, on this island, into visionary and personal Protestantism which felt no need to secularise itself", Andrew Duncan,
The Council of Heresy, Shearsman, 2009, p.249
"British poetry did not get the modernist 'idea' in any real sense until the 1960s, when significant works such as Basil Bunting's Briggflatts and J. H. Prynne's The White Stones were published", Anthony Mellors,
"Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.3
"More and more I feel bent against the modern English habit (too much
encouraged by Wordsworth) of using poetry as a channel for thinking aloud,
instead of making anything", Matthew Arnold,
"Unpublish Letters of Matthew Arnold", 1923
"I cannot bear the fantastically dull poems of the
British avant-garde who write like a cargo cult with battered copies of Ashbery and Olson to worship", William Logan,
"Reputations of the Tongue", University Press of
Florida, 1999, p.263
"Other countries, especially the US, have long envied
the vitality of Britain's literary culture", Prof Kevin Sharpe,
"Times Higher Education", 25th Feb, 2010, p.27
"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
"During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Italian poetry enjoyed a privileged status in the English literary system, with an abundance of translations and adaptions testifying to this presence. This asymmetrical relationship has changed over the centuries, and in the twentieth century, and especially in the post-World War II period, the political power of the US and symbolically at least, Britain has been reflected in a similar position of dominance in the literary field", Daniela Caselli and Daniela La Penna (eds),
"Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation", Continuum, 2008, p.2
"The second half of the Italian twentieth century, however, proved very politically dynamic in literary and linguistic terms, seeing a progressive decentralization and revision of the aesthetic, linguistic and ideological values associated with a monolingual and monological version of the canon. In this crucial historical period, Italy was characterized by an energized social mobility after the fall of the fascist regime, and by extended episodes of social unrest", Daniela Caselli and Daniela La Penna (eds),
"Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation", Continuum, 2008, p.2
"Caselli analyses how Italian poetic modernism and neo-avanguardia have been received in Anglophone culture, highlighting the ways in which the current opposition between an anti-experimentalist British late twentieth century and the focus on the avant-garde found in its American counterpart has also conditioned the penetration of Italian modern poetry into these two literary markets", Daniela Caselli and Daniela La Penna (eds),
"Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation", Continuum, 2008, p.8
"It is clear that Christian names lend themselves to transposition to a greater extent than surnames, and thus the Italian formula 'adapted first name + original surname' has long been successful ... It would seem that the transition from the ancient to the modern approach occurred,. more or less, during the years of the Second World War", Daniela Caselli and Daniela La Penna (eds),
"Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation", Continuum, 2008, p.28
"Literary translations mirror, or bear traces of, the fairly radical change in standard written Italian that has taken place over the past decades and continues to take place ever more rapidly. Translations therefore age quickly", Daniela Caselli and Daniela La Penna (eds),
"Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation", Continuum, 2008, p.32
"One of the most obvious aspects of the evolution in written Italian is the function and register of the Tuscan variant. More or less up until the 1950s, it remained relatively central to standard Italian; now it has slid to the margins, where it carries dialectal, decorative, literary or archaic connotations", Daniela Caselli and Daniela La Penna (eds),
"Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation", Continuum, 2008, p.32
"It is evident that, in verse, rhyme is much more important than metre. Therefore in Italian the iambic pentameter, the dominant verse of English and German metre, is rendered either freely or with the hendecasyllable, its mensural equivalent.", Daniela Caselli and Daniela La Penna (eds),
"Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation", Continuum, 2008, p.36
"it is possible to identify two real constants in the translation of poetry in Italy, particularly in renderings produced by translators who are themselves also poets. The first is the abhorrence of repetition, but lexical and syntagmatic, which leads to an emphasis on variation. The second is a certain propensity for the verso-frase ('verse-sentence') that ends with a strong, or fairly strong, pause", Daniela Caselli and Daniela La Penna (eds),
"Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation", Continuum, 2008, p.39
"Until recently, the Italian poetic language enjoyed much greater freedom than other European languages as far as the placement of word is concerned (inversions, hyperbatons and so on). This freedom, justified by the Latin model, affects the linearity of the verse.", Daniela Caselli and Daniela La Penna (eds),
"Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation", Continuum, 2008, p.42
"clearly, behind this taste for variatio lie the classicism and humanism that are the mark and characteristic form, or perhaps the affliction, of Italian literature", Daniela Caselli and Daniela La Penna (eds),
"Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation", Continuum, 2008, p.43
"Italy lacks a category of modernism which could be compared to its English, Irish or American counterparts", Daniela Caselli and Daniela La Penna (eds),
"Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation", Continuum, 2008, p.59
"searching for interesting contemporary Italian poetry had been a lost cause
during the 70s and early 80s: poets were mostly imitating American schools (Beats, Black Mountain, Confessional), when they were not scrupulously visual and minimalist", N.S.Thompson,
"The Dark Horse", No 29, p.34
"the larger bookstores carry less and less new poetry, which is increasingly produced and read locally. Poets publish with small regional presses, such as Quadernetto in Milan and La Camera Verde in Rome. Small circles of poets gather in cafes, neighborhood bookstores, and public exhibition and reading spaces like Turin's Salone Internazionale del Libro and Milanos Casa della Cultura. And many literary prizes remain attached to the culture of individual cities: the Premio Viareggio, the Rapallo Carige Premio, the Premio Campiello of the Veneto, the Premio Napoli, and the Premio Bagutta, named after the Milanese restaurant where it was founded.
An American poet, with her own provincial outlook, finds that the most striking difference the Italian literary scene presents is its almost total lack of academic support. ", Susan Stewart,
"Italian Poetry in an Age of Spectacle", Parnassus: poetry in review (32:1/2) [2011], p.110-
"The populations gathered within the present borders of the Italian Republic experience perhaps more than those of any other country in the world of similar geographical and population size, a native condition of internal and external plurilingualism", Forgacs and
Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.95
"in a country where translations of foreign novels dominate the literary market, Italian writers have been very responsive to contemporary writing abroad", Forgacs and
Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.249
"Historically, the identification of 'culture' with education and literacy, as well as with the high arts, seems to have been more resilient in Italy than in many other countries", Forgacs and
Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.3
"The homosexual movement echoed many of the practices of feminism - the collective-based structure, the emphasis on beginning with the personal, the critique of psychoanalysis, the celebration of the body and sexuality, the critique of the bougeois family and of formal politics", Forgacs and
Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.153
"During the 1960s and 1970s the economic importance, if not the prestige, of Milanese publishing grew to a point where the Italian publishing industry was a largely monocentric system", Forgacs and
Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.190
"Ultimately, it could be said, television in Italy has occupied the entire space that in some other countries is shared with the popular press", Forgacs and
Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.206
"In Italy, the position of women writers has been made more difficult by their absence from the technical and formalist experimentation traditionally associated with literary avant-gardes (the most influential avant-garde movement of the post-war period - the Gruppo 63 - was made up entirely of men)", Forgacs and
Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.249
"In England and in France accounts of the rise of the novel describe the slow evolution of a genre over at least two centuries; historically linked to the romance, its attention was on the the 'private' person and the issues were love and courtship. marriage and the family. Not so in Italy. Here the rise of the novel is associated with one book - Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi", Forgacs and
Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.249
"The absence of a reading public and a flexible and responsive written language were to continue to plague the novel in Italy until the 1980s", Forgacs and
Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.250
"The early nineteenth century had seen an animated debate in Italy between the
Classicists and Romantics over the morality of the novel as a genre ... together with a general disquiet about its appropriateness to an Italian culture which allegedly excelled in poetry and the epic. What was absent from the debate then ... was the question of what constitutes a novel. There is a remarkable, and refreshing, lack of concern about the definitions of narrative genres, which has continued to the present day", Forgacs and
Lumley (ed), "Italian Cultural Studies", OUP, 1996, p.258
"[poetry should] resist the intelligence / almost successfully", Wallace Stevens
"One sheds one's sicknesses in books, repeats and presents again one's
emotions to be master of them", D.H.Lawrence
"The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all", TS Eliot,
"Tradition and the Individual Talent"
"negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason", Keats,
"Letter to George and Thomas Keats", December 22, 1817
"Creative writers have traditionally suspected the intellect, analytical thought, of being the enemy of creativity", Philip Gross,
""
"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".
"I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.", Evelyn Waugh
"Miss Austen's novels ... seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow", Ralph Waldo Emerson
"[Plath] was always a posthumous person, but it took
her years to acquire a posthumous style", Helen
Vendler", "Last Looks, Last Books", Princeton University Press, 2010, p.69
"One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no
one is thinking of firing it.", Chekhov, letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev (pseudonym of A. S. Gruzinsky), 1 November 1889.
"You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are even worse", Tolstoy (to Chekhov)
"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.
"Ashbery is modernism's last aesthete, a case of
aestheticism so arrested he is often mistaken for a monument ", William Logan,
"Reputations of the Tongue", University Press of
"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
"Just as fractal science analysed the ground between chaos and Euclidean order, fractal poetics could explore the field between gibberish and traditional forms", Alice Fulton ,
"Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three
Dimensions", Thumbscrew No 12 - Winter 1998/9
"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 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.
"any middle-aged editor who doesn't talk to poets in their 20s about the contemporaries they're reading is in danger of publishing only young poets who sound like the now-middle-aged ones they grew up with", Don Paterson,
"The Guardian", 21/01/11
"In middle age I think most posts' style changes in the sense that they are reaching behind their carefully constructed artifice to the innocence of vision they started out with", Harry Clifton,
"The Poetry Paper", Issue Seven, 2010/11
"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
"Young poets should have no
individuality", Derek Walcott,
"???", 1980
"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.
"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
"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"
"The common end of all narrative, nay, of all Poems is to convert a series
into a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move
on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings, a circular motion-the
snake with its Tail in its Mouth", Coleridge,
"Collected Letters", IV, p.545
"Collage, the art of reassembling fragments of
preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, was the most
important innovation in the art of the twentieth century", Charles Simic,
"Dime-Store Alchemy"
"[collage is] the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century", Gregory Ulmer
"My knowledge of the world exists validly only in the moment when I am transforming it ... Discontinuities, wave breaks, cell divisions, collapsed structures, boundaries between tissue kinds: where inner workings are unknown the only reliable participations are imaginative", Allen Fisher, "Brixton Fractals", 1985
"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
"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
"Jabes, like the German Romantics, holds that the fragment is our only access to the infinite. I tend to think it is our way of apprehending anything", Rosamarie Waldrop in "Moving Borders", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed), Talisman House, 1998, p.614
"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
"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)
"I'm with the former Director of the Poetry Society of Great Britain, Christina Patterson, who said, 'If you knew as many poets as me, you'd certainly hesitate to say that poetry improves communication skills: or indeed mental health!'", Fiona Sampson,
"Poetry Writing: The expert guide", Robert Hale,
2009, p.183
"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
"[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
"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
"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
"love, perhaps even more than child-bearing, is the pivot of women's oppression today", Shulamith Firestone,
"The Dialectic of Sex", 1972, p.121
"The 'intrusion' of dreams in women's realistic writing increasingly gave a new texture to their fiction, especially after the 1950s, making it possible to put hidden desires and ancestral fears centre stage", Oriana Palusci,
"Reading Alice Munro in Italy" (ed Gianfranca Balestra et al), (The Frank Iacobucci Center for Italian Studies, 2008), p.47
"Re-vision - the act of looking back, or seeing with
fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for
women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of
survival", Adrienne Rich,
"When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision", 1980,
"For serious twentieth-century women poets, traditional
poetic form has had a troubled legacy", Annie Finch,
"A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women", p.1
"it is my experience as an editor, one confirmed by many editors I have spoken with, that it is far harder to find women poets who are interested in writing criticism", David Yezzi,
"The Rest Is Criticism", "Contemporary Poetry Review", Nov 2010
"Women columnists still make their fortunes by
attacking other women ... Is it, in fact,
a time-honoured way to get a book contract or a political
appointment. Trashing one's own gender remains a path to advancement", Erica Jong,
"The Guardian", April 12, 2008
"According to Dame Rebecca West, unhappiness is still the keynote of contemporary fiction by English women", Elaine Showalter,
"Towards a Feminist Poetics"
"The gender-based dichotomy between public and private speech is arguably the most significant factor in the historical marginalisation of women writers", Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.140
"Many Women are unable to take themselves seriously as
writers until they
reach a certain age, with the waning of family commitments alongside the
waxing of self-confidence and considered
abandon", Linda France,
"Sixty Women Poets", Bloodaxe, 1993
"Destabilizing language, form, narrative has historically been the task of both modernist and postmodern innovation. But there is a central problem with these two twentieth-century movements of linguistic and formal critique. The problem is Gender Politics", Rachel Blau DuPlessis in "Moving Borders", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed), Talisman House, 1998, p.589
"[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 conventional or mainstream poem today is a univocal, more or less plain-spoken, short narrative often culminating in a sort of epiphany. Such a form must convey an impression of closure and wholeness no matter what it says", Rae Armantrout,
"Sagetrieb", 11.3 (1992)
"mainstream verse ... tends to lean heavily on the subjectivity of poets as a perceived wellspring of universal wisdom", Adam Fieled, in
"Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.34
"Speaking broadly, there are two general modes in UK & US poetry ... one is
a product focussed aesthetic, the other is a process-based approach. The
product focussed aesthetic relies on clarity of context, presenting
self-contained, more or less complete thoughts and evincing a concern for
descriptive accurary when considering the external world. It is, to
caricature slightly, occupied with realizing recalled events, sometimes
through memory's distorting effects, while keeping failings of language
under discursive control. This is often also called 'mainstream'. ... Its
weakness is that it can rely too heavily on rhetorical commonplaces, or
conceits, and can easily feel naively decorative to the more
philosophically concerned, or sentimental or even redundant in its efforts
to describe the outside world convincingly.
The process-led approach ... is concerned with poetry as a way of speaking
about the world that simultaneously presents the difficulties of doing so.
... To the young contemporary ear, being too 'product' in approach can end
up sounding pompous or over-wrought; old hat. Too experimental or 'process'
focused can seem solipsistic and, again, but differently, over-wrought
... So, we have a popularising neo-surrealist ironic school in evidence,
growing out of a collision between the 'product' and 'process' approaches
outlined; a poetry of the absurd, ironising meaning-making, which in fact
one can find moving and meaningful, allegorically", Nathan Hamilton,
" Rialto 70", 2010, p.4-5
"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 [mainstream] work appears spoken in a natural voice; there must be a sense of urgency and immediacy to this 'affected naturalness' so as to make it appear that one
is reexperiencing the original event; there must be a 'studied artlessness' that gives a sense of spontaneous personal sincerity; and there must be a strong movement toward emphatic closure",
Charles Altieri, "Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry", CUP,
1984, p.10
"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
"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
"To be any good, it seems, a magazine, like a Romantic poet, has to be of erratic appearance, insult the respected, and die young", Jeremy Teglown, "Grub Street and the Ivory Tower", OUP, 1998
"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
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.
"The reading public of the 1850s was ten times that of the 1750s ... A Dickens does not create, but is created by, his public", Stephen Potter, "The Muse in Chains", Jonathan Cape, 1937, p.183
"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
"few kinds of writing seem so dated, so clearly wrong, as old book reviews", Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense, p.19
"Bad and ungenerous reviews are necessarily more subjective than positive and generous reviews, because as with any other manifestation of ill will, the bad reviewer is indulging in an egotistical display of some state of mind that is supposed to enhance the reviewer's status at the espense of the subject of the review", Jane Smiley,
"13 Ways of Looking at the Novel", Faber and Faber, 2006, p.262
"one cannot review a bad book without showing off", Auden
"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
"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
"given that young age and small literary community of [Australia], a wholly
disproportionate number of writers have made their name there on the basis
of dishonest claims about authorship", Melissa Katsoulis,
"Telling Tales", Constable & Robinson, 2009, p.10
"Most hoaxes
have an air of sadness about them. Rejection by parents or publishers and a
bitterness that overflows into a lack of self-respect are what characterize
their perpetrators", Melissa Katsoulis,
"Telling Tales", Constable & Robinson, 2009, p.136
"The greatest obstacle facing prose-poem investigators is comprehending how prose is given that extra something … that is, poetry … and not, say, a newspaper sketch. The borders between the prose poem and the sketch (or the vignette) are not always clearly traced", John Taylor,
"Two Cultures of the Prose Poem", Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. XLIV, no. 2, Spring 2005
"American poets tend to begin with a fact and work toward an idea, while their French counterparts begin with an idea and work toward a fact", John Taylor,
"Two Cultures of the Prose Poem", Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. XLIV, no. 2, Spring 2005
"Does prose poetry tolerate distortion and disjunction more readily than the lyric poem? I would say no; however, the prose poem does allow it to occur less dramatically. Its pedestrian, unadorned nature seems more open to sudden changes that might appear histrionic or cloying in verse", Mark Irwin,
"American Poetry Review", Nov/Dec
2011. Vol. 40.6, p.39-
"Perhaps the greatest challenge of the prose poem
(as opposed to "flash fiction") is to compensate for the absence of the
margin. I try to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text. I cultivate
cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference, etc. 'Gap gardening,' I have
called it, and my main tool for it is
collage", Rosmarie Waldrop,
"???"
"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
"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.
"English mainstream poets seem to have regarded the prose poem as a peculiarly foreign affair and one to be avoided apart from those times when there was a public questioning of identity and language,", David Caddy, in
"Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.103
"Rosemary Waldrop describes as 'gap-gardening' the way the prose poem 'turns' on its inner disjunctions, as it lacks the more traditional turning of the line to effect that motion. Containment and movement find a balance",
Karen Volkman, in "American Poets in the 21st Century", Clauda Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan Univ Press, 2007, p.54
"The Romantic student arrives expecting affirmation of
her genius - anything less than praise is a failure to recognize her
inherent worth as a writer. The theraputic student has already completed
his work by arriving with poem in hand. Both students have no interest in
work - they simply want to be rewarded for who they already are", Jason Schneiderman,
"American Poetry Review", Mar/Apr 2010
"a workshop's primary function is to make explicit
what the writer feels about his or her own work but can't quite put into words", Jason Schneiderman,
"American Poetry Review", Mar/Apr 2010
"For (Pierre) Macherey, a work is tied to ideology not so much by what it says as by what it does not say. It is in the significant silences of a text, in its gaps and absenses, that the presence of ideology can be most positively felt", Terry Eagleton,
"Marxism and Literary Theory", p.34
"To understand a literary style, consider what it
omits",
Mason Cooley
"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
"The true artist may be best recognised by his acts of omission", Pater,
"Appreciations with an Essay on Style", p.18.
"Hopkins's metrical experiments were not ahead of his time; on the contrary, they place him firmly amid the Victorian concerns about the standards and character of the English language", Meredith Martin, ,
"The Rise and Fall of Meter", Princeton UP, 2012, p.78
"Put simply, 'inscape' is the unified complex of characteristics that gives each thing its uniqueness and thereby differentiates it from other things, and 'instress' is the force of being that holds inscape together", Meredith Martin, ,
"The Rise and Fall of Meter", Princeton UP, 2012, p.54
"Saintsbury wanted it both ways. On the one hand, he wanted to popularize the foot-based system as natural for those with an English ear, and on the other hand wanted all Englishmen to possess an ear precisely like his own, despite his bitter awareness that they did not", Meredith Martin, ,
"The Rise and Fall of Meter", Princeton UP, 2012, p.99
"no fact of the world is better known than that metre, or rhythmical construction, is that form of language which is the first beloved of memory in its dawn, and the latest which attends it in its journey in decline", George Raymond,
" Chronicles of England: A Metrical History", 1842, p.viii
" do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you", GM Hopkins,
"A letter to Bridges", 1877
"[b]lank verse has been the metre of genius, that it is only used successfully by indubitable poets", Symonds,
"The Blank Verse of Milton", 1880
"The immediate success of the [war poem] anthologies ... proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse ... There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years", Gosse,
"Some Soldier Poets", 1917
"Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative", Matthew Arnold,
"Reports", 1880, p.200
"the longing represented in the [Sappho] fragments was doubled by a longing felt by readers for the fragments themselves to be made whole", Matthew Reynolds,
"The Poetry of Translation"
"While many academics refuse to countenance the thought of actually teaching anything to do with creative writing, often those who do teach it feel a sense of inferiority and anti-academic aggression", Nicholas Royle,"Times Higher Education", 28th March, 2013
"It is obvious ... that [Creative Writing's] recent and remarkable expansion is closely bound up with the marketisation of higher education", Nicholas Royle,
"Times Higher Education", 28th March, 2013
"Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past", Nicholas Royle,
"Times Higher Education", 28th March, 2013
"If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary", Bergson, ""
"A work of art is esthetically valid to the extent that it can be perceived and understood according to multiple perspectives and manifests a large variety of viewpoints and resonance without ever ceasing to be uniquely itself", Eco,
"???"
"The writer is now as much a commodity as a book", Matt Haig,
"http://www.booktrust.org.uk", March 2013
"The gatekeepers still have the power, but there are a lot more gates than there used to be", Matt Haig,
"http://www.booktrust.org.uk", March 2013
"much contemporary verse reads failed failed short-short stories rather than
failed poetry", Alice Fulton,
"Feeling as a Foreign Language", Graywolf Press, 1999, p.283
"The poet cannot build the sublime in thirty lines ... To feel the
head-in-a-whirl intoxication of the sublime, readers must submit to the
temporal demands of a long poem", Alice Fulton,
"Feeling as a Foreign Language", Graywolf Press, 1999, p.301
"Postmodernism critiques "the natural"; transcendence exceeds it. I
suggest that the two relations be collapsed into one technique, an excess
that unhinges foundational assumptions", Alice Fulton,
"Feeling as a Foreign Language", Graywolf Press, 1999, p.302
"I've learned that my readings of others' work often has little connection
to their intentions. This doesn't mean that my response is wrong, and it
doesn't make the author's views less right. Poets, like their poems, are
"hopeful monsters"", Alice Fulton,
"Feeling as a Foreign Language", Graywolf Press, 1999, p.176
"The technologies of composition, not new media, inspire innovations in literary styles and forms", Jason Pontin,
"How Authors Write", MIT Technology Review, Vol 115, No 6, p.92
"Romanticism's elevation of the lyric has meant that for the last few centuries our very idea of poetry has been intimately tied up with the idea of the authentic, personal, speaking voice", Sarah Broom,
"Contemporary British and Irish Poetry", Palgrave, 2006, p.181
"many experimental poets argue that mainstream poetry invites the reader to 'consume' a poem without questioning its nature, construction and situation in history, just as modern capitalism seeks to seduce the consumer to buy goods without questioning the system in which they operate", Sarah Broom,
"Contemporary British and Irish Poetry", Palgrave, 2006, p.225
"surprising as it may seem, given the enormous political, demographic, and cultural changes of the post-World War II era, in the mainstream poetry press the lyric paradigm has remained remarkably constant ... First and most obviously, it is assumed that "poetry" involves lineated verbal - and only verbal text ... Second, ... the "modern" poem must avoid meter and fixed rhyme scheme - sound features too rigid to represent the phenomenology of individual consciousness. Third, lyric is understand to be the expression of a particular subject ... whose voice provides the cement that keeps the individual referents and insights together. Fourth, "modern" language should not be stilted or formal ... even as (fifth) a poem conveys its feelings and ideas only by means of indirection - which is to say, by metaphor and irony", Marjorie Perloff,
"21st-Century Modernism", Blackwells, 2002, p.155-158
"A child playing with dolls may shed heartfelt tears when his bundle of rags and scraps becomes deathly ill and dies ... So we may come to an understanding of language as playing with dolls: in language, scraps of sound are used to make dolls and replace all the things in the world", Khlebnikov,
"Collected works of Velimir Khlebnikov, Vol.3 ", 1997, p.383
"Most poetry currently written continues to follow the basic assumptions that govern the works just discussed. A generic "sensitive" lyric speaker contemplates a facet of his or her world and makes observations about it, compares present to past, divulges some hidden emotion, or comes to a new understanding of the situation. The language is usually concreate and colloquial, the ironies and metaphors multiple, the syntax straightforward", Marjorie Perloff,
"21st-Century Modernism", Blackwells, 2002, p.161
"the closer language comes to coinciding with [thought], the finer the result ... one might almost establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject - style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things", Flaubert
"In the ten years following the Second World War, literary modernism like an aging evangelical religion, had rigidified into orthodoxy", James E.B. Brelin,
"From Modern to Contemporary", 1984
"Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing and wanting, with denying, with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun ... prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun", Gertrude Stein,
"Poetry and Grammar"
"The mastery of a whole set of stylistic devices of a highly 'poetic' nature is what allows the translator to compensate on other levels for the irremediable loss of richness in, for example (indeed especially), sound-texture", Daniela Caselli and Daniela La Penna (eds),
"Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation", Continuum, 2008, p.44
"In truth I have never established hierarchies or distinguished between my own writing and that act which is commonly called translation. As far as I am concerned, in both it is a case of expressing myself in the clearest way possible", Caproni,
"Divagazioni sul tradurre", p.60
"The point of conjunction for realism and abstraction is that the real is
never real, since there is a shift into art or artifice. The 'real'
described is not the actuality, it is what is described by words. The
signifier is substituted for the real. Equally, however, the abstract is
never abstract (a point made by Coolidge re Chomsky), since, however
juxtaposed or scrambled, words do signify, thus the abstract cannot avoid
the signified. So the real is never entirely real - except as a text. The
abstract is never only a text", Anthony
Howell,
"Fortnightly Review", September 2012
"Few poets since the Romantics have published good books in their twenties,
and even the Modernists were generally at least at the cusp of thirty
(Frost forty, Stevens over). Poetry, like mathematics, is a young man's
game, critics used to say - but Shakespeare wrote his sonnets in his later
twenties or thirties, Browning was thirty when Dramatic Lyrics appeared,
Whitman thirty-six at the publication of Leaves of Grass. There will always
be outliers like Rimbaud and Auden; but poetry has become more like
fiction, needing the world to lend the shape that form no longer can", William Logan,
"Poetry", September 2012
"For the reader, the experience of time bunching and becoming dense at points of significant action in the story, or thinning out and skipping or glancing through nonsignificant periods of clock time or calendar time, can be exhilarating - in fact it may be at the heart of narrative pleasure", J.M. Coetzee,
in "Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews", David Atwell (ed)
"Avant-garde work ... is nothing if it's not a refusal of the very protocols which are preferred by mainstream venues and sales channels", Joshua Clover,
"Tears in the Fence" (Issue 55, Summer 2012), p.110
"il «significato» di una poesia sia in realtà una rete sottile di «significati» che si intrecciano sotto la sue superficie ed è proprio questo intreccio a farci dire che «è bella» (the meaning of a poem is in reality a fine net of meanings that interact beneath the surface and it's really this interacting that makes us say it's beautiful)", Donatella Bisutti,
"La poesia salva la vita", Mondadori, 1992, p.89
"quando la metafora apparentemente non c'è, abbiamo visto che è la poesia intera ad essere una metaphora (when there seems to be no metaphor, we've seen that the whole poem becomes a metaphor)", Donatella Bisutti,
"La poesia salva la vita", Mondadori, 1992, p.96
"tutto quello che si ripete con piccolissime differenze, per un curioso meccanismo della nostra psiche, ci dà piacere (everything that repeats itself with minor differences, by a curious psychological mechanism, pleases us)", Donatella Bisutti,
"La poesia salva la vita", Mondadori, 1992, p.99
"La poesia moderna fa molto use della «polisemia» per moltiplicare e anche nascondere i suoi «significati» (modern poetry makes much use of polysemy to multiply and also hide meanings)", Donatella Bisutti,
"La poesia salva la vita", Mondadori, 1992, p.146
"La poesia è un «cortocircuito fra inconscio e realaà (Poetry is a short-circuit between the unconscious and reality)", Donatella Bisutti,
"La poesia salva la vita", Mondadori, 1992, p.204
"La poesia moderna ha cercato invano, sopratutto con i simbolisti, alla fine dell'Ottocento, in Francia, di «decifrare» la realtà rendendola «leggibile» e svelandone il mistero. Tale sforzo doveva culminare con il fallimento del tentativo di Mallarmé (modern poetry has sought in vain, above all with the Symbolists at the end of the 1800s, in France, to decipher reality, make it readable and unveil the mystery. Such efforts surely culminated with the failure of Mallarmé)", Donatella Bisutti,
"La poesia salva la vita", Mondadori, 1992, p.227
"Almost any poem has to be read twice, first for strangeness, second for clarity", Peter Daniels,
"Round up the usual precepts: a poetry manifesto", Ink, sweat and tears
"Poetry depends on being simultaneously opaque and transparent. It can't be only one or the other. The pebble and the pool", Peter Daniels, "Round up the usual precepts: a poetry manifesto", Ink, sweat and tears
"The exploitation of narcissism has been one of the great technological breakthroughs of Western art in the last two centuries. Weighty arguments have also found this development starting with the Mannerist era, from around 1520", Andrew Duncan,
The Council of Heresy, Shearsman, 2009, p.51
"The modern poet is in effect building a musical instrument in order to find out what it sounds like. ... One can produce shapes either by copying them from the world, or by implementing formulae", Andrew Duncan,
The Council of Heresy, Shearsman, 2009, p.164
"most of the methods of poetry may have as their goal the removal of functional thought patterns and the lowering of resistance to suggestion and association", Andrew Duncan,
The Council of Heresy, Shearsman, 2009, p.214
"Because of this double surface where a body is simultaneously an object and a message communicating inner states and intentions, handling of objects gives away a lot about what a writer feels about his or her body, and about other people's bodies", Andrew Duncan,
The Council of Heresy, Shearsman, 2009, p.245
"In whatever way, and under whatever circumstances the reader may link the different phrases of the text together, it will always be the process of anticipation and retrospection that ... in turn transforms the text into an experience for the reader. ... [It's] closely akin to the way in which we gather experience in life", Iser,
"Modern Criticism and Theory"
"To get published in magazines, you have to sound like everyone else. When you get a book published you have to sound like yourself. And when you're long established you have to sound like no-one else", Adrian Slatcher
"the poems you will read in American Poetry Review or similar publications will, with rare exceptions, exhibit the following characteristics: 1) irregular lines of free verse, with little or no emphasis on the construction of the line itself ...; 2) prose syntax with lots of prepositional and parenthetical phrases, laced with graphic imagery or even extravagant metaphor ...; 3) the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany", Marjorie Perloff,
"Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric",
Boston Review, V37.3
"a favoured concept of poetical writing ...can be
defined, though no one poet will show all its traits ... the first-person singular is very prominent as mediator between the poem’s material and the reader. ... the poetry is basically subjective and the process at work is, typically, one of internalisation ... an insistent metaphorism, sometimes remote but generally clever or arty ... initial obliquity, teasing the reader with an almost riddle-like opening which is later solved ... the avoidance of idiolect or dialect, as too of disrupted syntax, neologisms, references beyond the cultural sphere, and avoidance indeed of any serious degree of abstract thought ... heavy end-rhyming, argumentation, or flashy displays of street-wise contemporaneity", Peter Riley,
"Poetry Prize Culture and the Aberdeen Angus",
Fortnightly Review, April 2012
"Ekphrasis is more common in poetry than in fiction, perhaps because a poem can formally re-create some of the properties of a work of art", John Mullan, "how novels work", Oxford UP, 2006, p.263
"A simile might promise to let us see something more clearly, but it also diverts us from what is being described", John Mullan, "how novels work", Oxford UP, 2006, p.272
"[i]n some respects a first-person narrator's relationship to his past self parallels a narrator's relationship to his protagonist in a third-person [point of view]", Dorrit Cohn,
"Transparent Minds", p.143
"Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance ... . In so doing, it prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self, which is now fully, though painfully recognised as non-self, It is this painful knowledge that we perceive at the moments when early romantic literature finds its true voice", de Man,
"The Rhetoric of Temporality", 1983, p.207
"self and language, are of course mutually implicated in poststructuralist thought. It is not that the self exists separate from language and simply uses it to express itself. The self, in the sense of the fully self-conscious human adult, does not exist outside of language and other sign-systems. In order to represent itself to itself, in order to be a self conscious creature, in order simply to be, the self must use signs, verbal or otherwise. And again, it does not merely 'use' signs as if they were detachable from them; it is, rather, coincident with them, it is constituted out of them. No self escapes the bounds of language and sign-systems", Aidan Day,
"Romanticism", Routledge, 1996
"There is no such thing as non-political poetry", Carolyn Forché
"Since World War Two, the consensus of writers and critics has been that poetry and politics ... simply don't mix", Richard Jones,
"Politics: An Anthology of Essays", William Morrow, 1985
"Chekhov always wanted to write a novel. He was going to call it 'Stories from the Lives of My Friends'.", Jeanne McCulloch, "Paris Review"
"The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.", Coleridge
"The rules of formal poetry generate not static objects like vases, but the same kind of bottom-up, self-organizing processes seen in complex natural systems such as flocking birds, shifting sand dunes, and living trees. ... symmetrical forms such as sonnets, villanelles, and ballad stanzas are not static 'received forms'; they evolve, like plants, through a process of iteration and feedback. The regular meter of formal poems 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,
"The Shape of Poetry", The Winter Anthology, V2
"You start by writing, don't you? And then you get
over that and become a reader", Peter
Sansom, Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, 2012
"The radical indentations [in "Tintern Abbey"] let space
into the verse column at irregular interval, signaling the abrupt
discontinuities and shifts associated with the Romantic
ode", Stephen Cushman,
"William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of
Measure", Yale, p.57
"Milton's blank verse anticipates the 'effects' of free verse by abandoning rhyme and using the line ending to wreak havoc on the sentence", Stephen Cushman,
"William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of
Measure", Yale, p.18
"the idea of the person enters poetics where art and reality, or intentionality and circumstance, meet", Lyn Hejinian
"baroque poetry exhibits not only explicit awareness of the nature and passage of time but also a tendency to manipulate time and exploit its paradoxes ... Baroque poetry often attempts to span the entire range between ... beauty and ugliness,egocentricity and impersonality, temporality and eternity", Preminger and Brogan, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
"Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back", Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense, p.122
"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood", T.S.Eliot,
"Dante", 1929
"Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones. ", Jane Smiley,
"13 Ways of Looking at the Novel", Faber and Faber, 2006, p.97
"The Poem - that prolonged hesitation between sound and sense", Valery
"Critics remain divided as to whether modernists, and Pound in particular, treat myth as a metaphor for sceptical inquiry or as a spiritual reality", Anthony Mellors,
"Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.1
"Prynne's increasing use of language derived from the physical sciences reveal a growing disenchantment over the gap between what he sees as the visionary state of the transcendental Real and the perception of physical response as a 'wounding' of moral ideals. ", Anthony Mellors,
"Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.198
"postmodernism [discloses] myth as ideology and treats the 'self' as a construct, not as an organic unity", Anthony Mellors,
"Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.23
"Untimately, Prynne want to get rid of 'meaning' altogether, and replace it with a formal significance, which, through the indeterminate contingencies of poetic Saying, moves beyond them to reaffirm a hidden agenda of mystical return", Anthony Mellors,
"Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.147
"Unlike T.S. Eliot, who could not see that the drive to mythic order was already a constituent of the capitalist dissociation of sensibility and not an alternative to it, Prynne is aware that a poetic of mythic synchronicities without complication will only buy into the rhetoric of the market and the advertising executive", Anthony Mellors,
"Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.163
"The hermetic in poetry is generally associated with forms of modernist writing deriving from romantic and symbolist models. Primarily, it describes works encoded with highly individualised symbolic meanings ... but it can also be applied to the Symbolists' efforts on purify language of base, commercial, and everyday meanings, an alchemical principle of the transubstantiation of matter designed to elevate poetry to the condition of music", Anthony Mellors,
"Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.3-4
"Heidegger is a highly problematic figure in modern critical theory because he is at once the modernist thinker par excellence and the architect of postmodernism", Anthony Mellors,
"Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.10
"Just as the New Critics found aesthetic significance in images of symbolic unity, literary critics who depend on arguments based on post-phenomenological and poststructuralist theory too often end up by positively evaluating modernist texts in terms of 'rupture', dislocation, and 'disunity', as if forms of non-unity possess value in and of themselves", Anthony Mellors,
"Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.12
"J. H. Prynne's poetry represents the most serious engagement with the modernist poetics of impersonality, Hermetism and fragmentation in post-war British poetry", Anthony Mellors,
"Late Modernist Poetics", Manchester University Press, 2005, p.167
"Myth, language and art begin as a concrete, undivided unity which is only gradually resolved into a triad of independent modes of spiritual creativity", Cassirer, "Language and Myth", p.98
"Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors", T.S. Eliot
"Wallace Stevens, when he read his poetry, never audibly broke the line", Stephen Dobyns,
"next word, better word", Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p.94
"because nonmetered poetry can lack the range of emotional effects found in metered poetry, it makes the enjambed line with its artificial pause even more important, and, aside from rhythm, it functions much like an artificial pause in conversation", Stephen Dobyns,
"next word, better word", Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p.101
"many poets of the following generation - the fourth after Lowell - who write nonmetered poetry no longer seem to have the example of metered verse within the ear, with the result that many of their lines appear flaccid and lack any apparent reason why a line is broken this way rather than that. Their lines often read like prose", Stephen Dobyns,
"next word, better word", Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p.102
"James used these commas to call attention to important words, used them in fact as line breaks are often used in poetry", Stephen Dobyns,
"next word, better word", Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p.129
"The reason why polysyllabic words are less common in poetry is because most have one stressed and three or four unstressed syllables. A number of theses together may make the line flaccid and turn to prose", Stephen Dobyns,
"next word, better word", Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p.182
"Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos "was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem, it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry", Stephen Dobyns,
"next word, better word", Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p.198
"When a philosopher, scientist, or psychologist discusses the discrepancy between the actual and the ideal, he or she attempts to convince us with the tools of discursive thought ... An artist does it differently ... their primary approach is different, even though both groups, if you will, are investigating the actual, the ideal, and the discrepancy in between", Stephen Dobyns,
"next word, better word", Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p.222
"In the twentieth century, dominated by the free verse revolution,
poetry came increasingly to be identified with lyric - primarily because
good free verse, lacking the rhythmic regularity of rhyme and meter, tended
to make extensive use of other aspects of sound form to achieve intensity
(assonance, consonance, alliteration) and, influenced by Modernism,
concentrated on direct, unadorned presentation of images to portray its
subjects", Kevin Walzer,
"The Ghost of Tradition", Story Line Press, 1998, p.25
"The progress of any writer is marked by those moments
when he manages to outwit his own inner police
system", Ted Hughes,
"What rhymes with 'secret'?", 1982
"The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art"", David Shields,
"Reality Hunger", Penguin, 2010, p.166
"Great art is clear thinking about mixed
feelings", Auden (paraphased and altered by
Edward Hoagland)
"In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others. I miss, in most contemporary poetry, the arguments, the extended rhetorical passages and essayistic digressions I enjoy in the poems of the 17th and 18th centuries (and in WH Auden and Marianne Moore)", Stephen Burt,
"Close Call with Nonsense", Graywolf Press, 2009, p.17
"To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical", Stephen Burt,
"Close Call with Nonsense", Graywolf Press, 2009, p.357
"Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend", Stephen Burt,
"Close Call with Nonsense", Graywolf Press, 2009, p.365
"In the 50 years preceding Wordsworth's publication of the preface, several momentous changes were taking place in the realm of "letters" which placed in question the basic verbal criteria of poetry. More precisely, neoclassical poetics and the preeminence of poetry as the only classical genre (even drama was written in verse) came under pressure from the gradual introduction of vernacular writing into school curricula and from the development of a vernacular canon (in English), which included for the first time the nebulous genre of prose fiction. ... it was inevitable that a new supergenre - called "literature" - would emerge to encompass the various levels of diction ranging from poetry to prose fiction to prose essay", Daniel Tiffany, "Poetic Diction and the Substance of Kitsch"
"Challenges to the integrity of poetic language in the latter part of the eighteenth century, culminating in Wordsworth's attack on poetic diction, provoked reactions from various poets and critics reasserting the "peculiarity" of poetic language - a development essential to the conditions leading to the emergence of poetic kitsch", Daniel Tiffany, "Poetic Diction and the Substance of Kitsch"
"writing poetry is essentially exploratory. It's not about healing, but about opening up the wound", Fiona Sampson,
"Poetry Writing: The expert guide", Robert Hale,
2009, p.183
"Sentimental poetry differs from naive poetry in that it relates the real state at which the latter stops to ideas and applies ideas to that reality", Schiller,
"On the Naive and Sentimental in literature"
"For me, the measure of a poem is the word, not the
line", John Kinsella,
"Poetry Review" (V 95.4, 2005)
"Poetry in not - as my friend Bill Matthews once
quipped - criticism in reverse. A poem's aim isn't to start with a
conclusion and then disguise it", ,
"The Practice of Poetry", Robin Behn and Chase
Twichell (eds), 2001, Quill/HarperResource, p.18
"In the context of modernist formal change, the stanza may both be seen as giving spatio-temporal shape to ordinary language, or to fragment or do violence to it", Stefan Holander,
"Wallace Stevens and the Realities of Poetic Language", Routledge, 2008, p.125
"Whitman's extreme subjectivism is, as is frequently the case in modernist poetics, an objectivism", Stefan Holander,
"Wallace Stevens and the Realities of Poetic Language", Routledge, 2008, p.31
"A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity - he is continually informing - and filling some other body", Keats,
"Letter to Richard Woodhouse", October 27, 1818
"if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all", Keats,
"Letter to John Taylor", February 27, 1818
"The emergence of digital literature firmly refuted the concept of the author as the originator of any incontrovertible truths folded within a literary works and, by extension, all discourse", Theodoros Chiotis, in
"Stress Fractures" edited by Tom Chivers, 2010, p.75
"The relationship between poetry, the most elevated and exclusive of literary discourses, and the imperatives and demands of political commitment is especially problematic. Poetry's formal and linguistic modes of expression, its characteristic qualities of allusiveness and compression, are largely inimical to the polemical and ideological nature of political statement", Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.120
"Chekhov referred to just such compositional motivation
when he stated that if one speaks about a nail beaten into a wall at the
beginning of a narrative, then at the end the hero must hang himself on that
nail. A prop, in this case a weapon, is used in precisely this way in
Ostrovsky's "The Poor Bride"", Tomashevsky,
"Versions of Formalism"
"the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him 'personal'", TS Eliot,
"Tradition and the Individual Talent"
"The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the
mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor", Tony Hoagland,
"Poetry", September, 2010
"Inspiration, in its Romantic form of a state of super-creativity, is an aspect of 'modernity' in the sense of that condition in which the writer 'no longer knows for whom he writes', a situation contemporary with the demise of patronage, the professionalisation of the writer, and the emergence of mass audiences", Timothy Clark,
"The Theory of Inspiration", Manchester UP, 1997, p.11
"enthusiasm is an overwhelming case of residual orality ... Poetic inspiration is becoming the 'natural' insistence of more genuine modes of language, token of a 'truer' or deeper self which addresses, and depends upon, an ideal of bonding communal feeling", Timothy Clark,
"The Theory of Inspiration", Manchester UP, 1997, p.76
"Automatism can be read as the culmination of an aspect of French Romanticism, taking up Rimbaud's programme of a derangement of all the senses to deliver the writer's habitual self over to a realm in which 'I' is an other", Timothy Clark,
"The Theory of Inspiration", Manchester UP, 1997, p.197
"Fish does not share Bakhtin's acute sense of
the problem of language as he feels he can dispense with the notion
of a 'true' reality", Alsop and Walsh,
"The Practice of Reading", 1999
"Poetry and code - and mathematics - make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader read three kinds of pattern at once; code moves the reader from a static to an active, interactive and looped domain; while algebraic topology allows us to read qualitative forms and their transformations", Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo,
"DOVETAILING
DETAILS FLY APART ALL OVER, AGAIN, IN CODE, IN POETRY, IN CHREODS"
"Interfaces called transparent allow us to interact/do what we're supposed to do without being aware of how the effects are obtained. We should perhaps speak instead about their opacity, given that we cannot see through them to the machine", Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo,
"DOVETAILING
DETAILS FLY APART ALL OVER, AGAIN, IN CODE, IN POETRY, IN CHREODS"
"It is the role of the artistic coder to question the coding languages, both through self-reflection and by using them for unintended purposes. These coders introduce multiplicity where none existed and challenge definitions of intent for the entire environment of programming language, machine and system", Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo,
"DOVETAILING
DETAILS FLY APART ALL OVER, AGAIN, IN CODE, IN POETRY, IN CHREODS"
"In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends ... They are still a minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response", F.R. Leavis, "Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture", Gordon Fraser, 1930
"the genuine writer has nothing to say. He has only a way of speaking", Robbe-Grillet
"This capacity for oversignifying, for reading in, is precisely what
poets tap into, both in their own practice and in the poem the give to the
reader; and in doing so they turn language against its own project of
conceptual division, and use it to heal itself - and in the process -
paradoxically - to articulate new concepts that it can't yet accommodate.", Don Paterson,
"The empty image: new models of the poetic trope",
"Lakoff's idea is that most of our thought is guided by underlying
conceptual mappings between two domains that share some content, that
overlap in the sets of their attributes. ... Contrary to the assertions of Lakoff and some of the cognitive metaphor
theorists, people can read through to an underlying mapping, but only when
the surface metaphor is new to them.", Don Paterson,
"The empty image: new models of the poetic trope",
"I feel that at any stage of my literary career it
could have been said that the last book contained all the others",
V. S. Naipaul, " Nobel lecture", 2001
"I think that there are empty ecological niches in the
literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a
niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit",
Edmund White
"Most poets I know discovered poetry around the same time they discovered masturbation. And probably for the same reason. Poetry gives us a place to explore our passions, to play with possibilities, to open ourselves up to the ecstatic",
D.A.Powell, in "American Poets in the 21st Century", Clauda Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan Univ Press, 2007, p.81-82
"Which of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience? It was, above all, out of my exploration of huge cities, out of the medley of their innumerable interrelations, that this haunting ideal was born", Baudelaire
"Irony seems to have become problematic in the
postmodern poetry world ... For one thing, it seems too easy ... The
superciliousness of irony is not the only count against it, however. It
has been said that irony is politically paralyzing, that it delights at
pointing to problems instead of imagining solutions", Rae Armantrout in "Moving Borders", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed), Talisman House, 1998, p.674-5
"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.
"The 'open text' often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers", Lyn Hejinian in "Moving Borders", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed), Talisman House, 1998, p.619
"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
"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
"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 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
"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
"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
"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
"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 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".
"If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices", Susan
Howe.
"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 - "[The 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
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
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.
"[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)
"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