Prose

Poetry

Quotes on the subject of poetry.

Eliot's Poetic Technique

Indeed, both "classicism" and "romanticism" are impressionistic labels affixed to largely heterogenous material, and themselves badly in need of definition. That no completely satisfactory definition ...

Maximalist Poetry

To feel the head-in-a-whirl intoxication of the sublime, readers must submit to the temporal demands of a long poem, which run counter to the demands of a sound bite. You won’t experience the ...

Clara

Quotes relating to the envy / compassion question.

The Years of Rice and Salt

And there was that phenomenon Kirana had mentioned once in passing, of people imagining that things were better in another land, which then gave them the courage to try to enact some progress in ...

1984

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison they never even become ...

Brave New World

At the end of the room a loud speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.

Nietzsche on Christianity and Art

Perhaps the depth of this *antimoral* propensity is best inferred from the careful and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout the whole book--Christianity as the most prodigal ...

The Angel of History

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are ...

Authenticity

 

The Given and the Made

In virtual reality, because all words, images and sounds can be easily altered, everything that is "given" — whether traditional canon or current expertise — can be taken as tentative or "made." ...

The Most Photographed Barn in America

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and ...

Poetry and War

What Is Found There takes its title from some lines by William Carlos Williams: "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there." In his ...

Sustainability

*There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.*

The Achievement of T.S. Eliot

[Quote regarding the particular delight in poetry when one does not share the beliefs of the poet]

The programmer and the poet

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so ...

Birthmark

Miranda July

Story of Your Life

Ted Chiang