F. H. Bradley Quotes

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

A lot of the lyrics I write involve images that just swing the song in a way that feels really good to me and there isn't a literal explanation. They're not riddles for the listener to solve.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.

In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.

From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.

I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.

I don't try to be satirical. I just try to get what's in my head on the page. And that part is hard for me to do. It takes a long, long time to make it poetic, somewhat essayistic.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

In a word, poetry can not exist without emotion, or, if you will, without a movement of the soul which regulates the words.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

In fact, sometimes traveling the world is a way of not writing a poem, but it's the quality of experience. It's being able to experience something and when you begin to write about it be able to apply the tools that you need for writing.