Ernesto Cardenal Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
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I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.
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Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.
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I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.
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The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
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None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
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The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.
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My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.
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No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job....Poetry..remains one person talking to another....no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is the master of the prosaic.
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From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and saga of the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?
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If poetry were nothing but texture, Dylan Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
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Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
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Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
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I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.
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I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.
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I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.
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I wrote a lot of poetry when I was a teenager - mostly desperate love poetry!
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Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.
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I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.
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I'm yet to discover any form of theocracy that isn't homophobic, that isn't bigoted to the out group.
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I just want someone to explain to the American public why investing in transportation in Iraq is so much more important than investing in passenger rail right here in the United States of America.
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I am hoping that, with the added wisdom of old age, I can still look ahead for an improvement in tone, line, colour and composition.
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Slogan-making is not poetry.
