Traditional Forms Quotes

In the information age, when tradition, propriety, formality or culture clash with informational ease and utility, the traditional forms must … yield.

So with the young African artists. What they have to learn from tribal art is not how to copy the traditional forms, but the confidence that comes from knowing that somewhere inside them there should be the vitality which enabled their fathers to produce these extraordinary and exciting forms.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not.

The artist must be blind to distinction between 'recognized' or 'unrecognized' conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age.

I am not a new journalist, whatever that is. I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.

We recognize the distinctness of Asian art when we turn to its traditional forms, recognize it as Japanese, Chinese and Indian, even Balinese or Thai.

All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.

The real ecumenical crisis today is not between Catholics and Protestants but between traditional and experimental forms of church life.

The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.

As the architecture of a country always follows the earliest structures, American architecture should be a refinement of the log-house. The Egyptian is so of the cavern and the mound; the Chinese, of the tent; the Gothic, of overarching trees; the Greek, of a cabin.

It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.