A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers.
Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.
Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
No opposing quotes found.