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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
Doesn
Suggest
Soul
Fancy
Ideas
Silly
Come
Wings
Wrings
Hard
Poetry
Crashing
Writing
Emotional
Ethereal
Work
Sort
Devastating
Something
Experience
Dove

More quotes by 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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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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Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.
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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I don't like quintessential certitude.
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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A thousand kindnesses do not make up for a thousand blows.
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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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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The measured blood beats out the year's delay.
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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The women rest their tired half-healed hearts they are almost well.
Louise Bogan
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I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe.
Louise Bogan
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Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.
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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But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.
Louise Bogan
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The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.
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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Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side, And madness chooses out my voice again, Again.
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