Saul Williams Quotes

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.

Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.

In the ancient times, bards went around singing the epics, which were storehouses of philosophy.

I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.

Most of our history has been recorded orally. Among us Cherokee people we used to have people who were trained to listen at all meetings and then pass it on.

Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.

My background is deep and set in deep time, and in a narrow space, oral traditions going back a long, long time, which I inherited by osmosis.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

The earliest form in which romances appear is that of a rude kind of verse.

To realise belatedly that there are Swahili epic poems which rival their European equivalents for sweep and power has been exciting.

Because we are all of an oral tradition in our beginning histories, the voice of the poet in this particular society will be heard.

Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels.

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.

I began telling stories as a volunteer in my daughters' school. But I grew up hearing stories from Cuban and Southern storytellers, and I learned a great deal by just being quiet and listening.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

We're trying to let people see what their grandfather told them about.

My people have called upon me to speak to you. The red man has no books, and when he wishes to make known his views...like his father before him...he speaks with his mouth. He is afraid of writing. When he speaks he knows what he says; the Great Spirit hears him. Writing is the invention of the pale faces;

Before books, nothing got saved. We don’t know what the cavemen thought about caves even though they tried to write on the walls.

History: Gossip well told.

Long before we created libraries, or even books, poetry was the way we humans remembered who we were, a primary means of documenting and contemplating our lives.