A Quote by Jose Marti
A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
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I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.
There was engrained poetry and then when you look back at our history and in the 20th century, the last century, probably the greatest writers of the 20th century were Irish. It became our only weapon, was our poetry, our music.
I'll say that this is probably the best time for poetry since the T'ang dynasty. All the rest of the world is going to school on American poetry in the twentieth century, from Ezra Pound to W. S. Merwin, and for very good reason. We have soaked up influence in the last century like a sponge. It's cross-pollination, first law of biology, that the more variety you have the more health you have.
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.
The 19th century was a century of empires, the 20th century was a century of nation states. The 21st century will be a century of cities.
And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.
I find it strange that - at least in my take on it - the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient. It's always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it's found its way back. And it's simply an ingredient.
Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.
My father, who was a cabinetmaker, told me, 'Wood has a grain and if you go into the grain, you have beauty. If you go against it, you have splinters - it breaks.' And I took that as my view of life. You have to follow the grain - to be sensitive to the direction of life.
The United States' poetry emerged when there was a high literacy rate in the United States, even in the 19th century. People read the poetry when it was written. In Ireland, there was a poor literacy rate and people remember that poetry. That was handed on as a memorial tradition.
Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.
Given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority ... a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and hence the century of the State.
You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at the turn of the 20th century when there were about fifty million people?
The 20th Century was the century of Aviation and the century of Globalization. The next century will be the century of Space.
Poetry doesn't necessarily need to be some erudite thing. Your mom telling you a story is just as much poetry as some old 17th century thing that no one really understands. I think that those boundaries should be broken down!
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