I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen.
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts And power to him who power exerts; Hast not thy share? On winged feet, Lo! it rushes thee to meet; . . .
Any good movie is filled with secrets. If a director doesn't leave anything unsaid, it's a lousy picture. If a picture's unsaid, it's a lousy picture. If a picture is good, it's mysterious, with things unsaid.
Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
But, perhaps, the flatterer is not often detected; for an honest mind is not apt to suspect, and no one exerts the power of discernment with much vigour when selflove favors the deceit.
Great Power, capable of everything and only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties. We are not a great power and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to be a great nation. Let us take warning from the fate of the Great Powers of the past and not burst ourselves with pride .
Poetry teaches us things that cannot be learned in prose, such as certain kinds of irony or the importance of the unsaid. The most important element of any poem is the part that is left unsaid. So the poetry frames the experience that lies beyond naming.
But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn't it? - and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.
Power is what spoils people. Yes, it seems to me that the seeking after power is the great danger and the great corruptor of mankind.
Every great idea exerts, on first appearing, a tyrannical influence: Hence, the advantages it brings are turned all too soon into disadvantages.
Each social formation, through each of its material activities, exerts its influence upon the civic whole; and each of its ideas and ideals wins also its place and power.
It is not the thing on which we spend the most time that moulds us, but the thing that exerts the greatest power. Five minutes with God and His Word is worth more than all the rest of the day.
I like Beryl Bainbridge a great deal, and she is a writer who absolutely demands to be read a second, third, and fourth time. I admire her great courage in leaving so much unsaid and asking the reader to really engage her brain.
A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination." Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm... all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.
People of great power wield great power, but people of lesser power or people who have fallen out of power go to jail without adequate evidence, or their bodies are found in the trunks of cars.
My dad encouraged me to quit my job and pursue the life that I am about to have. He got excited with me. He was the first one to tell me that I could do it. I am 30 years old, and I still find great power in my own dad telling me it's possible. I still find great power in my own dad telling me I can do it.