Raheem DeVaughn Quotes

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

It's funny, I'm very analytical in my real life, but in terms of my films, I try to not analyze them at all and let things just go into them and let them be what they are. I mean, people ask me to this day what 'The Squid and the Whale' stood for, and I have no idea except that it's an exhibit in the Natural History Museum.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.

When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly.

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.

If you are afflicted with an artistic feeling, it's just perfecting something.

As a songwriter, metaphor is instinctual.

I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry.

And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?

Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.

Poetry isn't an activity, it's a way life is lived.

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.