A Quote by Van Wyck Brooks

Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.

Van Wyck Brooks

Quote Topics

Barrel Music Organ Poetry

Quote Author

Van Wyck Brooks
American - Critic
February 16, 1886 - May 2, 1963

My earliest memories about music are connected with going to church and listening to organ music. I am not from a musical family, actually, and I remember my first musical fascination to be for organ music. I wanted to become an organist and not a pianist.

Rafal Blechacz

Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.

Nikki Giovanni

As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry.

Henry Purcell

I found all my reading and writing informed my music in subtle ways. Ravedeath came out of studying the pipe organ, going to New Jersey - the world's loudest and biggest pipe organ.

Tim Hecker

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

Clifton Fadiman

I played the organ when I went to military school, when I was 10. They had a huge organ, the second-largest pipe organ in New York State. I loved all the buttons and the gadgets. I've always been a gadget man.

Stephen Sondheim

Poetry and music are the best at the highest level of the human mind. Out of poetry, out of their need for poetry, human beings have developed the idea of God. And so when we sing, when we dance, when we speak poetry we are speaking out of God's mouth, each other out of the music from God's heart.

Maya Angelou

You could pay a fair market price for a barrel of oil and cut 50 cents a barrel or a dollar barrel off what you're going to pay Mexico and use that money and put it towards to the building a wall. If they don't like it, too bad we're go buy the oil.

Eric Bolling

...."the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of the day; two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon.

Bruno Schulz

A lot of places we go, when they see the organ coming in, they're expecting rock and roll, but after they hear us play they like it. To me, guitar cuts through-it carries more than organ. But organ has got more guts.

Wes Montgomery

At the end of the playback of the take of "Like A Rolling Stone", or actually during the thing, Bob Dylan said to the producer, turn up the organ. And Tom Wilson said, oh man, that guy's not an organ player. And Dylan said, I don't care, turn the organ up, and that's really how I became an organ player.

Al Kooper

I had been inspired by an organ player named Earl Grant, who played organ and piano together. My mom took me to see him. So I went home, put my piano and organ together, too.

Billy Preston

There's no difference between lyrics and poetry. Words are words. The only difference is the people who are in academic positions and call themselves poets and have an academic stance. They've got something to lose if they say it's all poetry; if there's not music to it, and you have to wear a certain kind of checkered shirt or something like that. It's all the same. Lyrics are lyrics, poetry is poetry, lyrics are poetry, and poetry is lyrics. They are interchangeable to me.

Van Morrison

I encourage everyone I know to sign an organ donor card, but if someone doesn't want to sign, that's his or her choice. If someone isn't willing to give an organ, however, why should that person be allowed to receive an organ?

Alex Tabarrok

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.