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But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry. ... It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.

Louise Bogan

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Louise Bogan
Age: 72 †
Born: 1897
Born: August 11
Died: 1970
Died: February 4
Author
Literary Critic
Poet
Short Story Writer
Translator
Writer
Maine
United States
Louise Mary Bogan
Come
Wings
Wrings
Hard
Poetry
Crashing
Writing
Emotional
Ethereal
Work
Sort
Devastating
Something
Experience
Dove
Doesn
Suggest
Soul
Fancy
Ideas
Silly

More quotes by Louise Bogan

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Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side, And madness chooses out my voice again, Again.
Louise Bogan
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It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.
Louise Bogan
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I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!
Louise Bogan
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It is through the acceptance of a variety of aethetic and intellectual points of view that a culture is given breadth and density.
Louise Bogan
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The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another.
Louise Bogan
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Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
Louise Bogan
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Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.
Louise Bogan
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... how much of our inner substance is it good for us to give to public griefs? The whole modern tendency to agonize over the suffering of the entire globe is surely something new.
Louise Bogan
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The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.
Louise Bogan
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... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.
Louise Bogan
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What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals, in private.
Louise Bogan
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But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.
Louise Bogan
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Hate does not present many choices if hate is your solution, you are fairly certain to hate all phemonena with equal joy and intensity, without troubling to drag into prominence any one feature from the loathsome whole.
Louise Bogan
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Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.
Louise Bogan
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Women have no wilderness in them They are provident instead Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread.
Louise Bogan
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Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.
Louise Bogan
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A thousand kindnesses do not make up for a thousand blows.
Louise Bogan
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Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.
Louise Bogan
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I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.
Louise Bogan
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But is there any reason to believe that a woman's spiritual fibre is less sturdy than a man's? Is it not possible for a woman to come to terms with herself if not with the world to withdraw more and more, as time goes on, her own personality from her productions to stop childish fears of death and eschew charming rebellions against facts?
Louise Bogan