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"Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation."
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"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."
"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."
"Amore is loveconfessed to you in haiku.Do you love me too?"
"The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars."
"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."
"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."
"Sometimes poets expect me to think far deeper than I'm willing to dig."
Explore more quotes by Robert Fitzgerald
"I think it was lucky that during most of the work on the Odyssey I lived on Homer's sea in houses that were, in one case, shaken by the impact of the Mediterranean winter storms on the rocks below."
"One should indeed read Pope with his notes available, in the Twickenham edition possibly, to see what a vast amount he did understand about Homer."
"That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way."
"Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear."
"The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it."
"There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know."
"Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek."
"I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition."
"In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary."
"Now, the language that had grown up and formed itself on those principles is what one is dealing with, and the problem is to bring a work of art in that medium into another medium formed on different principles and heard and understood in a different way."
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