Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Literary Criticism
Literary Criticism
Purposes
Definitions
"As I see it, the value of poetry is that it should matter. It should matter first to the
writer and then to the reader", Michael Rosen
poetry is the "fusion of three arts: music, storytelling, and painting" where the line
represents the poem's music, the sentence explains the story and the image displays
the 'vision' of the poet, Molly Peacock, "How to read a poem ... and start a poetry
circle", 1999, p.19
"a poem is an interruption of silence, an occupation of silence, whereas public
language is a continuation of noise", B. Collins
"A poem needs to find a way into itself", G. Margolis
"A poem is a detour we willingly subject ourselves to, a trick surprising us into the
deepened vulnerability we both desire and fear. Its strategies of beauty, delay, and
deception smuggle us past the border of our own hesitation", J. Hirshfield, "Nine
gates: Entering the mind of poetry", Harper Collins, 1997, p.125
Poets "peer into dark places and speak for those who have no voice. They wonder into
the cities and forests, with eyes and ears open, and report on these experiences with
astonishing candor and subtleness", Parini, "Why Poetry Matters", Yale UP, 2008,
p.178
"Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally
different from conceptual thought", Dana Gioia, "The Dark Horse", 2015, p.17
"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