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Quote by Edna Longley

“Poetry is often very critical of the culture from which it emerges. Quite often literary critics of a nationalist bent talk up the national culture, in a way that the literary texts don't. Poetry can bring out areas of denial and repression.”

Quote by Edna Longley

Author

Edna Longley is an individual who was active in the mid-20th century, born in 1940. Her career and professional category are currently unknown. Her life story and contributions are limited to available information. more

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“I do feel that a poem needs not just space, but, ideally, space around that space - space for meditation, reverie, subliminal link-ups. I sense that poetry happens at a level above or below intelligence. It doesn't come into being at a purely rational level.”

Needs Feels Happens Space Levels Meditation Rational Links Reverie Subliminal

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“Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the other areas are overlapping and interacting as well, the emotional, intuitive, animal areas.”

Wells Courses Born Animal Brain Emotional Areas Reasoning Intuitive Interacting Overlapping Throttle

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“The job has left me with a healthy disregard for what you might call Public Life. I have no desire now to go to receptions, to be seen at gatherings of the great and the good, to stand and be bored to death by men in grey suits.”

Men Might Jobs Desire Left Healthy Suits Bored Grey Gathering Public Life Disregard Reception Bored To Death

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“I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.”

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“There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.”

World Believe Danger Favour Publicity Puff

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“In America, where you'd have thought the country's so huge it couldn't happen quite so cosily, everyone's giving his imprimatur to everyone else. You line up three or four well-known poets and a couple of eminent academics on the dustjacket, and the rest of academe follow like sheep. That's death really, if you take pleasure in it. Mind you, the occasional puff's hard to resist, but you shouldn't inhale.”

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“I'm not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but it's bad for your poetry to take steroids.”

Ifs World Mean Challenges Lines Four Waste Ambition Steroid

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“I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.”

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“I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.”

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“For me the form, the stanzaic shape, is an endorsement, proof that I'm engaged with the Latin or Greek at an original level, that my versions are explorations.”

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