WE NEED THEOLOGIANS & POETS

'...when we seek to enter into the mystery of our faith we must call the poets to the table as well as the theologians.'

Malcolm Guite, Lifting the Veil, p.51

POETRY DEFINED

'What is poetry? Poetry relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special, so that it will be remembered and valued.'

John Carey, A Little History of Poetry, p.1.

THE ESSENCE OF ART

'What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.' 

Carl Jung in Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.155. 

THE TRUE POET

'The man who has had the time to think enough,
The central man, the human globe, responsive
As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,
Who in a million diamonds sums us up.'
Wallace Steven in John Drury, Muisc at Midnight, p.328. 

UNDERSTANDING POETRY

'...the only real way to understand poetry is to know the life and beliefs of the poet.'
Elizabeth Bishop in John Drury, Music at Midnight:  The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, p.322.

POETRY

'A function of poetry is to give words to intuitions that, if expressed in prose, would fall apart under their own flimsiness; to see what is coming and try and express it and not have it understood until everybody else can also see it, at which point they will claim that they saw it all along.'

Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, p.84. 

POETRY

'The poet contemplates the chaos of experience, the confusion of accident, and the incomprehensible realms of possibility - which is to say the world in which we all so intimately live that few of us take the trouble to examine it. The fruits of that contemplation are the discovery, or invention, of some small principle of harmony and order that may be isolated from that disorder which obscures it, and the subjection of that discovery to those who poetic laws which at last make it possible. No general ever more carefully exercises his troops in their intricate formations than does the poet dispose his words to the rigorous necessity of meter; no consul more shrewdly aligns this faction against that in order to achieve his need than the poet who balances one line with another in order to display his truth; and no Emperor ever so carefully organizes the disparate parts of the world that he rules so that they will constitute a whole than does the poet dispose the details of his poem so that another world, perhaps more real than the one that we so precariously inhabit, will spin in the universe of men's minds.' 

John Williams, Augustus, p.295. 

NEW POEM

'So far, so good.'
Roger McGough in The Oxford Book of Children's Poetry, p.18.

POETRY

'When the poet stares at that which the rest of us merely glance at, he invites us to take a longer look along with him. It is precisely this longer look that is necessary to cultivate a sensibility for the significant.'

T David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach, p.53.