This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
Poetry |
The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
Creed | Dogma | Future | Illusion | Life | Life | Mankind | Philosophy | Poetry | Race | Religion | Rest | Science | Time | Tradition | Will | World |
Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretive both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.
It is impossible to learn the art of poetry second-hand. Poetic inspiration comes only from the depths of the soul.
Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds - epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them; they will never forget it.
Experiment | Fear | Good | Imagination | Novels | People | Poetry | Tragedy | Will |
People fancy they hate poetry and they are all poets and mystics.
William Jones, fully Sir William Jones of Nayland, aka Trinity Jones
The Bible contains more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever age or language they may have been written.
Age | Beauty | Bible | Books | History | Important | Language | Morality | Poetry | Bible |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art... Great poetry may be made without direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely... It is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, to so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.
Art | Emotions | Experience | Feelings | Greatness | Poetry | Work | Art |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.
Deprive poetry of this which it has in common with philosophy--the seeing of things as they are--and the beauty and fragrance of the flower are gone.
Beauty | Philosophy | Poetry | Beauty |
Elizabeth Drew, aka Elizabeth Brenner
We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Poetry — No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician's. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought.
Good | Logic | Need | Poetry | Will | Wisdom | Poem | Think |
Jacques Lacan, fully Jacques Marie Émile Lacan
The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom.