Modernist Poetry Quotes

1. "I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events. (p289)"
Author: Azar Nafisi

2. "Your friend's poetry is terrible," he said.Clary blinked, caught momentarily off guard. "What?""I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random."
Author: Cassandra Clare

3. "It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!"
Author: G.K. Chesterton

4. "It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society.[...]what the poet is saying- that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose- is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether."
Author: George Orwell

5. "Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going."
Author: James Laughlin

6. "The wind smelled of humus, lichen, the musky odor of pecan husks broken under the shoe, a sunshower on the fields across the bayou. But any poetry that might have been contained in that moment was lost when I stared into Honoria's face, convinced that human insanity was as close to our fingertips as the act of rubbing fog off a window pane."
Author: James Lee Burke

7. "A life without poetry is a life without heart, without laughter, without crying - it's a life without feelings."
Author: Kristian Goldmund Aumann

8. "There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble. Than its stone walls its paper walls are thicker; armoured with learning, with philosophy, with poetry that drifts or dances clamped though it is in midnight. Shielded with flax and calfskin and a cold weight of ink, there broods the ghost of Sepulchrave, the melancholy Earl, seventy-sixth lord of half-light."
Author: Mervyn Peake

9. "It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose."
Author: Peter Davison

10. "In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime."
Author: Phyllis McGinley

11. "The terrible poetry of human nudity, I understand it at last, I who tremble for the first time in trying to read it with blasé eyes."
Author: Rachilde

12. "Beowulf stands out as a poem which makes extensive use of this kind of figurative language. There are over one thousand compounds in the poem, totalling one-third of all the words in the text. Many of these compounds are kennings. The word 'to ken' is still used in many Scottish and Northern English dialects, meaning 'to know'. Such language is a way of knowing and of expressing meanings in striking and memorable ways; it has continuities with the kinds of poetic compounding found in nearly all later poetry but especially in the Modernist texts of Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce."
Author: Ronald Carter

13. "Starting with a melody, she'll lead you far away down passages of poetry where dreamers often play."
Author: Susan Waterwyk

14. "Protest poetry -- could there be consensus poetry?"
Author: William Edgar Stafford

15. "Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it."
Author: Witold Gombrowicz

Modernist Poetry Quotes Pictures