Top 76 Quotes About Poetry And History
#1. Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.
Dejan Stojanovic
#2. History describes what has happened, poetry what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.
Aristotle.
#3. To feel strong, to walk amongst humans with a tremendous feeling of confidence and superiority is not at all wrong. The sense of superiority in bodily strength is borne out by the long history of mankind paying homage in folklore, song and poetry to strong men
Fredrick Hatfield
#4. I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
Howard Nemerov
#5. Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
Aristotle.
#6. In Italy, almost at every step, history and poetry add to the graces of nature, sweeten the memory of the past, and seem to preserve it in eternal youth.
Madame De Stael
#7. Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#8. Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time.
Paul Kingsnorth
#9. Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.
Jane Hirshfield
#10. A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably ... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.
Aristotle.
#11. I just read anything I could find. Fairy tales and mysteries and history and poetry. It didn't matter what it was. I would read it over and over and over again. The books, they helped keep me from losing my mind all together.
Tahereh Mafi
#12. History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme
Seamus Heaney
#13. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#14. Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece.
Leslie Marmon Silko
#15. Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
Robert Penn Warren
#16. I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
Diane Wakoski
#17. The moment Aunt March took her nap, or was busy with company, Jo hurried to this quiet place, and curling herself up in the easy chair, devoured poetry, romance, history, travels, and pictures like a regular bookworm.
Louisa May Alcott
#18. But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history
that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires.
C.S. Lewis
#19. I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.
Saul Williams
#20. To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations.
Octavio Paz
#21. A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#22. We are all of life
who stepped from the sea
trading weightless journeys of the currents
We are all of life
who build and tear down and build again
to find gold and silver
to find scars that weep and bleed
to step from the sea
to stay with the sea
Tamara Rendell
#24. I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.
Mahmoud Darwish
#25. Yes, the mistrust of poetry has a long history, for a variety of reasons, but they all come down to sentiment and invention over fact and truth. Figurative language is suspicious.
Mary Ruefle
#26. As a filmmaker coming from one of the youngest lands in the world, New Zealand - safe, green and democratic - I was intrigued by Afghanistan, with its literature and poetry, its old land and its deep history.
Pietra Brettkelly
#28. I mean, in the history of poetry there have been a lot poetries where you have to inherit the position of poet from your ancestors and I think that if you just leave anyone to become a poet based on an aristocratic society, then a lot of people are left out who might have something to offer.
Edward Hirsch
#29. Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#30. Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead.
Maltbie Davenport Babcock
#31. The dead" we say as if speaking
of "the people" who
gave up on making history
simply to get through
Something dense and null groan
without echo underground
and owl-voiced I cry Who
are these dead people these
lovers who if ever did
listen no longer answer
: We :
Adrienne Rich
#32. Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.
David McCullough
#33. A compelling and important story of First Word War Scotland, a time when women redefined the word hope as the world was losing its innocence. Andrea MacPherson writes beautifully, balancing the lives of her characters between history and the poetry of gesture, secrets and love.
Ami McKay
#34. We will remain unwritten through history, no X will mark us on the map; but in books of prose and poetry, you loved me once, in a paragraph.
Lang Leav
#35. She has been better educated than her sister, and has a more receptive mind. It seems as though someone had sown in a bare field a sprinkling of history, poetry, and pictures, and every seed had shot up in a flowery tangle.
Edith Wharton
#36. I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.
Sally Kirkland
#37. When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#38. Recently I've been dreaming
of cursing old people
with little provocation,
because their culture
has a long history of enslaving,
raping, and segregating,
and they have special lights
which prevent us from dancing.
Matthew Rohrer
#39. It is full of interest, it has noble poetry in it and some clever fables and some blood drenched history, some good morals and a wealth of obscenity and upwards of a thousand lies.
(Re The Bible)
Mark Twain
#40. When it was all over
the centuries started
to roll by
and history was written
by those
with no stories
misery turned into myth
and figures of speech
played catalyst
to happiness
Banoo Zan
#41. Soho has got to be at its centre. It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers, all those things, and I think it should be valued as such, and protected as this centre for bohemia.
Marc Almond
#42. They say that history is going on somewhere.
They say it won't stop. I have held
One picture still for a long time and waited.
William Stafford
#43. ...while cleverness is appropriate to rhetoric, and inventiveness to poetry, truth alone is appropriate to history.
Procopius Of Caesarea
#44. Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.
Dejan Stojanovic
#45. 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.
Nicholas Royle
#46. Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.
Henry David Thoreau
#47. Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.
Damon Galgut
#48. For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#49. The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious.'
John Drane
#50. Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Francis Bacon
#51. The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#52. English kings married their cousins and so their kids were as sharp as clubs.
Peter Prasad
#53. They were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn't officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.
Hanya Yanagihara
#54. Those who read the Scriptures as magnificent literature, breath-taking poetry, or history and overlook the story of salvation miss the Bible's real meaning and message.
Billy Graham
#55. I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
Yehuda Amichai
#56. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#57. The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.
Michelle Obama
#58. Once upon a season,
a heart was kissed by poetry.
That very same heart grew into a magnificent tree.
Its branches were made of pure honesty
as love grew from its leaves.
Its history was composed of you and I.
Delano Johnson
#59. For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.
Aristotle.
#60. Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.
James Fenton
#61. An editorial in the Los Angeles Times [1923] wistfully asked, 'Will eating chestnuts by crackling log fires become one of the lost arts preserved by a devoted people only in poetry and romance?
Susan Freinkel
#62. Not only dowomen sufferindignities in daily life, but the literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science, philosophy, poetry, and song.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#63. Brahma and Airavata
Long ago in lands of golden sand
Brahma turned to Saraswati
and gently kissed her inked hand ...
Muse
#64. To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.
Archibald MacLeish
#65. Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.
Nelson Mandela
#66. The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.
Matthew Pearl
#67. If freedom is free and none need worry, then what blood drops for thee?
Ryan Goodrich
#68. These men seem not to know that poetry has its particular rules and precepts; and that history is governed by others directly opposite.
Lucian Of Samosata
#69. Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
Walter Jon Williams
#70. What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.
Claude Calame
#71. You are in a country that comes and goes, where the people have been mistreated but rarely oppose. Borders have changed by rulers from afar, although sometimes closer than neighbourhoods are. Their religion is sacred and the heavens smile down, but the history they keep will lead you to frown...
Sean F. Hogan
#72. History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.
from Past Present and Future are One
Aberjhani
#73. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.
Pat Conroy
#74. Muhammadan law in its relation to women, is a pattern to European law. Look back to the history of Islam, and you will find that women have often taken leading places - on the throne, in the battle-field, in politics, in literature, poetry, etc.
Annie Besant
#75. How pleasant a world would be in which no man was allowed to operate on the Stock Exchange unless he could pass and examination in economics and Greek poetry, and in which politicians were obliged to have a competent knowledge of history and modern novels.
Bertrand Russell
#76. Religiously, we longed for the lively life in Christ, but we did not fully see that we were equally longing for the lively life of the mind - the delights of conversation at once serious and gay, which is, whatever its subject, Christ or poetry or history, the ultimately civilized thing.
Sheldon Vanauken
