C. S. Lewis Quotes

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course.

In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.

If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.

but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.

Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.

That's how I always try to start my thoughts. I write them down first, eventually it turns into a poem, and if I feel like composing something to it, then I do that.

Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.

It may sound affected - but it is the act of creation itself, and it is equally exhilarating whether one is working on a teaspoon or a national bank.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.

All creative work begins by doing something with the hands. Creation is simply a problem and design is the way out.

I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

Without playing with fantasy, no creative work has yet come into being.

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.

In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.

The Biblical story of the creation is an excellent parable of movement. The work of art, too, is above all a process of creation, it is never experienced as a mere product.

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.