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Portal:Poetry/Quotes archive/2006 archive

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This is an archive of article summaries that have appeared in the Quotes section of Portal:Poetry in 2006. For past archives, see the complete archive page.


Week 26 2006
W. H. Auden
Robert Frost
Walt Whitman



Week 27 2006
Basho
Emily Dickinson
A. E. Housman



Week 28 2006
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow



Week 29 2006
Robert Graves
Robert Frost
Dante



Week 30 2006
Ben Jonson


William Shakespeare's epitaph



Week 31 2006
Carl Sandburg
From Richard Lovelace's To Althea, from Prison



Week 32 2006
Robert Graves
Ismail Kadare



Week 33 2006
Robert Graves


William Wordsworth



Week 34 2006
Molière
William Wordsworth



Week 35 2006
G. K. Chesterton
Robert Herrick



Week 36 2006
Peter Porter


Geoffrey Hill, from Without Title



Week 37 2006
John Dryden on John Donne


Macduff, in the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare upon discoving the slain body of the king.



Week 38 2006
William Ernest Henley


Robert Frost


Andrew Marvell



Week 39 2006
Sir Walter Ralegh


Dante


from Beowolf



Week 40 2006
Leonard Cohen
Oscar Wilde



Week 41 2006
Basho
Emily Dickinson
A. E. Housman



Week 42 2006
T. S. Eliot
John Milton in Paradise Lost



Week 43 2006
Carl Sandburg
From Richard Lovelace's To Althea, from Prison



Week 44 2006
Matsuo Bashō
Sigmund Freud



Week 45 2006
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow



Week 46 2006
Charles Bukowski



Week 47 2006

The Parasite's Defense

In 1964 Soviet authorities charged Joseph Brodsky with "тунеядство" — parasitism. From the transcript of his trial smuggled to the West:

Judge: And what is your profession in general?
Brodsky: Poet translator.
Judge: Who recognized you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?
Brodsky: No one. And who enrolled me in the ranks of humanity?
Judge: Did you study this?
Brodsky: This?
Judge: To become a poet. You did not try to finish high school where they prepare, where they teach?
Brodsky: I didn’t think you could get this from school.
Judge: How then?
Brodsky: I think that it ... comes from God.[1]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ The original transcript reads: Судья: А вообще какая ваша специальность? Бродский: Поэт. Поэт-переводчик. Судья: А кто это признал, что вы поэт? Кто причислил вас к поэтам? Бродский: Никто. (Без вызова). А кто причислил меня к роду человеческому? Судья: А вы учились этому? Бродский: Чему? Судья: Чтобы быть поэтом? Не пытались кончить Вуз, где готовят... где учат... Бродский: Я не думал, что это дается образованием. Судья: А чем же? Бродский: Я думаю, это... (растерянно)... от Бога... The translation is taken from Remembering Joseph Brodsky by Cissie Dore Hill at Hoover Institution Archives



Week 48 2006
There are certain arts which employ all the means which I have mentioned, such as rhythm and tune and metre--dithyrambic and "nomic" poetry, for example, and tragedy too and comedy. The difference here is that some use all these at once, others use now one now another.
-Aristotle, Poetics
God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
-William Carlos Williams



Week 49 2006
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers



Week 50 2006

"I perceived that we in the West were indeed barbarians and foreign devils, and that we knew scarcely anything about poetry." -- Allen Upward (1863 - 1926), diplomat and poet, on his introduction to Chinese literature


Week 51 2006

"He [the poet] must divest himself of the prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same: he must therefore content himself with the slow progress of his name, contemn the applause of his own time, and commit his claims to the justice of posterity. He must write as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations; as being superior to time and place."

— spoken by Imlac in Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, Chapter X

"Enough! Thou hast convinced me, that no human being can ever be a poet."

— spoken by the Prince, Rasselas, Chapter XI


Week 52 2006

Q: How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

A: A poem is a compact sequence of unpredictable images. I remember reading about a B-baller called "Half Man Half Amazing". That phrase alone is a poem.

— Vietnamese-American poet Linh Dinh, interview at "Here Comes Everybody" blog, December 14, 2004

(http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2004/12/linh-dinh-is-author-of-two-collections.html)