All Quotes By Tag: Language

“Love’s language starts, stops, starts; the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.”

“Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.”

“The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: “What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that’s unutterable?” You can’t generalize very usefully about poetry; you can’t reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can’t successfully answer the question of “Why poetry?,” can’t reduce it in the way I think you can’t, then maybe that’s the strongest evidence that poetry’s doing its job; it’s creating an essential need and then satisfying it.”

“By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is not to be overwhelmed. … What is essential is to become one with the sickness, that is, in the context of language as a whole, to enter into contact with words.”

“The subtleties of the mind cannot be transmitted in words, but can be seen in words.”

“Words are power. The more words you know and can recognize, use, define, understand, the more power you will have as a human being… The more language you know, the more likely it is that no one can get over on you.”selection from book: Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community”

“I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language – a happiness we were born to have.”

“If words allow themselves to be handled, it is with the help of infinite carefulness. One has to welcome them, listen to the, before asking any service of them. Words are living things closely involved with human life.”

“In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.”

“Language is fossil Poetry.”

“that your power of commandwith simple language wasone of the magnificent things ofour century.(from the poem: result)”

“One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand”

“Language has not the power to speak what love inditesThe soul lies buried in the Ink that writes”

“The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.”

“It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn’t sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work — like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work. . . . Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that ‘rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things’? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: ‘Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do’st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.”