“We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.” PoetryMusic Book:Errata: An Examined Life Source: Errata: An Examined Life
“We are, in the main, 'word-blind' to Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent verse. This blindness results from a major change in habits of sensibility. Our contemporary sense of the poetic, our often unexamined presumptions about valid or spurious uses of figurative speech have developed from a conscious negation of fin de siécle ideals.” PoetryTranslationPhilologyPre Raphaelite Book:After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation Source: After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
“To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.” Life IsPoetryLiteratureForceIdentityConceptsNakedThinkerInadequateAllusionAnalogue Author:George Steiner
“Functions of technical information, historic record, analytic argument, which are integral and obvious to Dante's use of verse are now almost completely a part of the 'prosaic'.” UsePoetryLiteratureRecordsInformationArgumentFunctionObviousVersesHistoricAnalytics Author:George Steiner
“The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision .. in Western poetry so much of the charged substance is previous poetry.” PoetryLiteratureBreakFieldsPoetWesternCloudsTrackSubstanceSurroundAssociationDiscourseChamberParticlesCollisionConnotation Author:George Steiner
