A2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
UNIT 4 INDEPENDENT STUDY THROUGH
POETRY – AN INTRODUCTION
Poetry is……………….
“Poetry, the best words in the best order” S.T. Coleridge
“Poetry is the art of using words charged with their upmost
meaning” Dana Gioia
“It should strike the reader of a wording of his own highest
thoughts and appear almost a remembrance” John Keats
“Poetry is truth seen with passion” W.B. Yeats
“Poetry cannot be defined, only experienced” C Logue
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it
takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquillity” William Wordsworth
“It is a widening of consciousness, an extension of humanity” David Constantine
“A poem
should not mean
But be” Archibald
MacLeith
“Poetry is that
which arrives
at the intellect
by way of
the heart” R.S. Thomas
“Poetry is a
way of talking about things that frighten you” Mick
Imlah
Poetry is “a
little concoction of words against death” Miroslav
Holub
“In the dark
times
Will there
also be singing?
Yes. There
will also be singing
About the
dark times” Bertolt Brecht
“In the
deserts of the heart
Let the
healing fountain start
In the
prison of his days
Teach the
freeman how to praise” W.B.
Yeats
“Poetry is a
zoo in which you keep demons and angels” Les
Murray
“Poetry is
the voice of spirit and imagination and all that is potential as well as of the
healing benevolence that used to be the privilege of the Gods” Ted Hughes
“To see a
world in a grain of sand
And a heaven
in a wild flower
Hold
infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity
in an hour” William
Blake
“These
fragments I have shored against my ruin” T.S.
Eliot
“Poetry comes
out of wonder, not out of knowing” Lucille
Clifton
“Poetry is a
place where all the fundamental questions are asked about the human condition” Charles Simic
“Poetry is a
brilliant vibrating interface between the human and the non-human” Edwin Morgan
“Poetry can
tell us what human beings are” Maya
Angelou
