Remarks by John Drinkwater | V2Melody Quotations

“We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order—poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.”

Concluding that essential poetry transcends formal categories · Essay, The Lyric, Conclusion

“Unless it be wholly numbed in some such way, the delight of poetry is ready to quicken in almost every man; and with a little use it will quicken only to what is worthy.”

Expressing faith in a nearly universal capacity to respond to poetry · Essay, The Lyric, The Popularity of Lyric

“For the rest, whenever a true poem is given a musical setting, the strictly poetic quality is destroyed.”

Arguing that musical adaptation transforms rather than preserves a poem’s art · Essay, The Lyric, Song

“Both are poetry, springing from the same imaginative activity, living through the same perfect selection and ordering of words, and, in our response, quickening the same ecstasy.”

Finding a common imaginative source beneath different poetic forms · Essay, The Lyric, Lyric Forms

“Every word sings with life, and the whole passage shows perfectly the function of words in poetry.”

Celebrating language made vivid through poetic precision · Essay, The Lyric, Lyric Forms

“To solve this problem is his last and most exacting difficulty, demanding a continual wariness and the closest discipline.”

Emphasising the discipline required to find the necessary words · Essay, The Lyric, Lyric Forms

Art
Poetry

“When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.”

Portraying exact diction as an act of creative animation · Essay, The Lyric, Lyric Forms

Art
Poetry

“A dirge may be in racing anapæsts, laughter in the most sedate iambic measure; a solemn invocation may move in rapid three-foot lines, while grave heroic verse may contain the gayest of humours.”

Showing that metre does not carry a fixed emotional meaning · Essay, The Lyric, Lyric Forms

“It so happens that this energy, next to the poetic energy, is the most impressive and satisfying of all mental activities, and while poetry may exist independently of it, the fact remains that it very rarely does so.”

Valuing formal organisation as poetry’s closest creative companion · Essay, The Lyric, Lyric Forms

Art
Poetry

“The decision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood shall be related to the material used at the next is not in itself an operation of the purely poetic energy, but of another.”

Separating poetic inspiration from the craft of structural organisation · Essay, The Lyric, Lyric Forms

Art
Poetry

“Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.”

Viewing long poems as shaped sequences of individual imaginative moments · Essay, The Lyric, Lyric Forms

“The poetic mood, selecting a subject, records its perception of that subject, the result is a lyric, and the mood passes.”

Describing a lyric as the record of a fleeting state of perception · Essay, The Lyric, Lyric Forms

“To say that a lyric is generally short is but to say that poetic tension can only be sustained for a short time.”

Explaining brevity as a consequence of concentrated imaginative intensity · Essay, The Lyric, Lyric Forms

“It remains the most difficult of all human attainments.”

Describing true poetic achievement as exceptionally demanding · Essay, The Lyric, The Classification of Poetry

Art
Poetry

“The poetic energy may operate on many things through a million moods, but the character of the energy is immutable.”

Distinguishing poetry’s constant creative force from its changing subjects · Essay, The Lyric, The Classification of Poetry

“It is a fallacy to suppose that experience is any the less personal because it is concerned with an event happening to someone else.”

Affirming the imaginative reality of empathy · Essay, The Lyric, The Classification of Poetry

“And it seems to me, further, that what we have in our minds when we speak of lyric is precisely this same quality; that lyric and the expression of pure poetic energy unrelated to other energies are the same thing.”

Identifying lyric with poetry in its most concentrated form · Essay, The Lyric, What Is Lyric

Art
Poetry

“We find, in short, that this quality equals a maximum of imaginative pressure freeing itself in the best words in the best order.”

Defining poetic quality as imagination released through exact language · Essay, The Lyric, What Is Lyric

Art
Poetry

“Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.”

Placing the union of poetic gift and human greatness at the highest level · Essay, The Lyric, What Is Lyric

“All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.”

Demanding that poetry fully realise the imaginative force behind it · Essay, The Lyric, The Best Words in the Best Order

“For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable.”

Explaining how familiar themes can yield endlessly different poems · Essay, The Lyric, The Best Words in the Best Order

“All æsthetic appreciation and opinion can but depend upon our judgment, fortified by knowledge of what is, by cumulative consent, the best that has been done.”

Balancing personal judgement with knowledge of artistic tradition · Essay, The Lyric, The Best Words in the Best Order

“Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.”

Presenting poetry as a uniquely necessary form of communication · Essay, The Lyric, The Best Words in the Best Order

“It is the controlling mood that differs, not the material controlled.”

Locating artistic difference in perception rather than subject matter · Essay, The Lyric, The Best Words in the Best Order

Art
Poetry

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