A Quote by Robert Penn Warren

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Robert Penn Warren

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Attempt Autobiography Deepest Hazardous Part Poem Self Understanding

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Robert Penn Warren
American - Novelist
April 24, 1905 - September 15, 1989

If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.

Albert Camus

I want to reiterate that my understanding of the poem is not the poem's core, true meaning. Once a poem goes out into the world, the poet is just one more reader.

James Arthur

I write songs and I sing them from the deepest part of my existence and I hope they connect with the deepest part of yours.

Ben Harper

There is what might be called a Catch-22 of hazardous occupations: The more hazardous the job, the more men; the more men, the less we care about making the job safer. The Catch-22 of hazardous occupations creates a 'glass cellar' which few women wish to enter. Women are alienated not just out of the fear of being hurt on the job, but by an atmosphere that can make a hazardous job more hazardous than it needs to be.

Warren Farrell

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Christopher Hitchens

Traditional autobiography has generally had a poor press. The novelist Daphne du Maurier condemned all examples of this literary form as self-indulgent. Others have quipped that autobiography reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

Craig Venter

Men are not free when they're doing just what they like. Men are only free when they're doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

D. H. Lawrence

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.

James Dickey

In classical understanding, education is the attempt to "lead out" from within the self a core of wisdom that has the power to resist falsehood and live in the light of truth, not by external norms but by reasoned and reflective self-determination. The inward teacher is the living core of our lives that is addressed and evoked by any education worthy of the name.

Parker J. Palmer

One of the things that was really influential early on was Ezra Pound's Cantos, one poem he worked on for 50 years. It's epic. I had a great deal of difficulty understanding it. One of the problems was you'd be reading along in English and he would move to a Chinese ideogram or French-he actually used seven different languages in a given poem. And for somebody who's not fluent in different languages it has the impact of rupturing your way of understanding something.

Richard Misrach

It's a presumptuous thing to write one's autobiography, but this is really an effort in the deepest sense to explore the struggle of a tortured individual to be himself in a hostile society.

Sterling Hayden

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.

Archibald MacLeish

I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.

Denise Levertov

I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.

Billy Collins

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

Maya Angelou

People are more interested in reading bombastic ideas, whether they're positive or negative. Part of me has sort of lost interest in doing criticism because of that. I've always realized that criticism is basically autobiography. Obviously in my criticism, it's very clear that it's autobiography, but I think it's that way for everybody.

Chuck Klosterman

A Quote by Robert Penn Warren

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