Poetry is indispensable — if I only knew what for.

 

Poetry is indispensable — if I only knew what for.
--
As quoted in The Necessity of Art (1959) by Ernst Fischer, Ch. 1

 

Jean Cocteau

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In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.

 

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

 

Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.

 

Alfred North Whitehead

 

The events of my ushering into the world, my growing up and getting an education in Nakhchivan are indispensable for me. The constructional activities carried by me in Nakhchivan during my leadership in Azerbaijan are also indispensable for me. But the most indispensable from all these for me is my life and work with You starting from 1990 up to 1993.

 

Heydar Aliyev

 

Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.

 

Gertrude Stein

 

Any form of orthodoxy is just not part of a poet's province ... A poet must be able to claim ... freedom to follow the vision of poetry, the imaginative vision of poetry ... And in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet, the New Testament is metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and preacher as one who is to present poetry; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity, and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects. ... My work as a poet has to deal with the presentation of imaginative truth.

 

R. S. Thomas