The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain β and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
Interpretation
Poetry emerges from deep emotional pain, and poets seek to reconcile this pain with their experiences in the world.
This quote by Ted Hughes reflects the essence of poetry as a medium that expresses the profound emotional struggles encountered in life. It suggests that the core of poetry is often rooted in personal suffering, and the role of the poet is to convey and transform that anguish into a form that can resonate with others, ultimately seeking harmony between the internal experience of pain and the external world.
In practice
In a literary discussion about the emotional depths of poetry.
...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.
Nobody wanted your dance, Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering Drowning life and your effort to save yourself, Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil, Looking for something to give.
Havenβt you heard of the music of the spheres?β asked the dragon. βItβs the music that space makes to itself. All the spirits inside all the stars are singing. Iβm a star spirit. I sing too. The music of the spheres is what makes space so peaceful.
You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.
And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze_x000D_ _x000D_ About a star of deathless and painless peace_x000D_ _x000D_ But no astronomer can find where it is.
The real mystery is this strange need. Why can't we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess?
Drawing is not only a way to come up with pictures: drawing is a way to educate your eye to understand visual information, organizing it into a more hierarchical way, a more economical way. When you see something, if you draw often and frequently, you examine a room very differently.
To those supporters who were told that I abandoned them, that is untrue. I abandoned greed, corruption, and compromise, never you, and never the artistic gifts and abilities that sustained me.
You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born.
It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.
It's true the punk fashion itself was iconographic: rips and dirt, safety pins, zips, slogans, and hairstyles. These motifs were so iconic in themselves - motifs of rebellion.
A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself . . . with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.
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