Terry Eagleton Quotes

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

My work should be seen as poetry.

I think poetry, rather than suffering, is more and more sufficient to the needs of our society. It's one of the reasons so much of it is, for want of a better term, 'surreal.'

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

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?

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.

A book should be a garden that fits in the hands. Word-petals of color. Stems of strength. roots of truth. Turn a page and turn the seasons. Read the sentence and enjoy the roses.

Liquid, flowing words are the choicest and the best, if language is regarded as music. But when it is considered as a picture, then there are rough words which are very telling, they make their mark.

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!

An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity... but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.