“Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.” MenMayMadeImportantPlayStoriesSeemsImaginationInfluenceLandBuildingPoetMen And WomenMythGreekGiantsTemplesItalianNestsRenaissanceWovenEnglish HistoryGreek Myth Book:The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays Source: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays
“Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.” GivingEnergySocialNovelPoetAncientMythAccessNovelistsMuseMysticalHomosexualEroticStand AloneEmilyGreat PoetSubordination Author:Camille Paglia
“The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.” IfsHas BeensFactsBodyFormLossCommonPoetOughtCostMusicianToolsStonesFundamentalsMythSuperiorsPainterSymbolsSubstanceSavagesEffectivenessPierce Book:Tristes Tropiques Source: Tristes Tropiques
“From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.” KnowsReadingLiteratureAnswersFiguresPoetAspectMythAmerican Poetry Author:Diane Wakoski
“Moscow, Rome, London, Paris stay in place. Leningrad and New York float, spreading all their sails, cutting space with their prows, and can disappear, if not in reality, then in the imagination of the poet creating a myth, a mythical tradition on the grounds of his secret experience.” IfsRealityImaginationSpaceSecretCitiesCuttingNew YorkPoetCreatingTraditionMythDisappearLondonParisRomeSailFloatsMoscowLeningrad Author:Nina Berberova
“The poet who speaks out of the deepest instincts of man will be heard. The poet who creates a myth beyond the power of man to realize is gagged at the peril of the group that binds him. He is the true revolutionary: he builds a new world.” MenWorldPoetrySpeakRealizingHeardGroupsPoetInstinctMythRevolutionaryNew WorldPerilSpeaks Out Author:Babette Deutsch
“Because so many poets have chosen a political idiom right now in the US and so many poets have assigned value and inherent knowledge to their racial identity and used that as a form of argumentation, I'm thinking now's a good time to buy low for my own poems and write poems that are deeply in the interior and the psyche. There are plenty of people out there working on subjects of political poetry, partisan poetry, all the way through to crossing the threshold of propaganda. I start thinking now's a good time for me to start writing about the myths of my own psyche.” PeopleThinkingWritingPoliticalValuesIdentityPoetMythChosenPlentyPropagandaGood TimesIdiom Author:David Biespiel