“He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.”
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A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.