George Orwell’s ‘1984’ frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: it’s not a celebration of poetic language. It’s decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what ‘1984’ shows is that language can be a dirty trick.
Shakespeare’s plays were a great Teutonic Valhalla with brilliant sunshine at times and violent tempests at others. The world to him was a battlefield, but his sense of poetic justice, his sublime faith in life and its infinite resources, guided the battles.
I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn’t solve.
I have never, ever sought validation from the arbiters of British poetic taste.
In real life, having your poetry criticized by T.S. Eliot could cause you to doubt your poetic gifts. But imagining it in a dream has the opposite effect. That dream could become the source for a story.
In the poetic tradition, the heart’s affections are indeed holy, and if organizations are asking for people’s hearts and minds, they are asking in a way for their holy and hidden affections at the same time.
In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.
Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I’m willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct.
You know, rap is sort of like a form of talking, right? So it’s like you can hear, you know, the slaves doing it. You can hear, like, you know, Africans and Jamaicans doing it just kind of as, like, a rhythmic, poetic conversation, you know, to a rhythm.
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
I fell in love when I was 21, after returning from Australia. It lasted for about two years before she dumped me. It was, in retrospect, a really wonderful thing because it made me very poetic and melancholic.
Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It’s listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.
I love Tennessee Williams; as a playwright, he’s so poetic.
America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the heavens that cover them.
To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it’s a question of paying attention.
One of the things women poets have been engaged in – among the other things they’ve been doing – is revising parts of the poetic self. Re-examining notions of the authority within the poem, and of the poem.
New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.
Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic.
English is really free for me; there’s no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it’s just I live in Paris, and it’s really a poetic language where you can really play with words.
I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.
One of the things I think about as I’ve evolved as an architect is, ‘Where do the poetic impulses come from?’
My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc.
Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.
The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.
I love Tennessee Williams pieces; they are so poetic and I love period pieces.
I believe in poetic discourse, in the value of speech in a non-naturalistic way; it’s speculative.
Every intelligent person, whether he’s an artist or not – a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist – possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.
Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart.
I was taught that poems don’t end, they just kind of stop. There’s never an ending to a poem; it’s a continuation for later. When I write, I write for me, and I write in poetic form.
The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
I need to look back on my poetic ventures, make sense of them as a whole, and move forward… and to experiment without external demands.
As you get older, you want less from the world; you just want to experience it. Any barriers to feeling emotions get dismantled. And ordinary things become beautifully poetic.
Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that so little of any value has been added since.
A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.
Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.
Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican poetic idiom.
I try to use a poetic language more than talk about my feelings, but it is married to the music.
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
China has some cities, traditional cities, with a long history. They are so beautiful, and they were planned so smartly. I call them gardens on the city scale. For example, Beijing has mountains, waters, lakes, bridges, towers. It was a very poetic city.
The Bible… provides no guide to reading the Bible. In fact, it is full of such inconsistencies, contradictions, lacunae, obscurities, baffling tales, and poetic imagery that to quote it at all is to select from conflicting alternative passages. Every quotation is therefore necessarily an interpretation.
I could spend my whole life photographing circuses. They combine everything I’m interested in – they’re ironic, poetic, and corny at the same time. There’s also something about a circus that’s magical, sentimental, and almost tragic, like a Fellini film.
Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion.
I didn’t know until later, but my uncle was quite a famous bohemian in Glasgow, and he played guitar. My father was a kind of a poetic bohemian, and he read me poetry.
Look at almost any passage, and you’ll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It’s not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it’s just that that’s the way language works.
I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who’s ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?
It’s very hard to say I’m surrealist. It’s like saying I’m poetic. It’s not something you want necessarily to be aware of.
1985 – That was my time in New York, and I have such poetic, fond memories.
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
It is a long story how we finally ended up with the title simply being ‘The Legend of Korra,’ but in a poetic way, I think Korra’s big Type A personality willed it to happen!
On the red carpet, I need to be protected. When I wear a Chanel dress, I feel like I’ve earned the right to be there. And Karl Lagerfeld is so poetic, such an intelligent man. I like the way he has the power to draw attention.
Sometimes I wish I was poetic and subtle. I write very bold and blunt and tell it like it is.
Most of my life I have played a lot of famous people but most of them were dead so you have a poetic license.
Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.
