The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes poetry's role in giving meaning to human existence.
Robert Penn Warren's quote suggests that poetry, like a myth, embodies the human ability to imbue life with significance and purpose. Through the creative expression found in poetry, individuals can explore and articulate the complexities of their experiences, thereby shaping their understanding of life's meaning and their place within it.
In practice
In a literary discussion about how poetry reflects human experiences.
...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after youβve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.
And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.
Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
So little time we live in Time,_x000D_ _x000D_ And we learn all so painfully,_x000D_ _x000D_ That we may spare this hour's term_x000D_ _x000D_ To practice for Eternity.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.
Music has been my outlet, my gift to all of the lovers in this world. Through it - my music, I know I will live forever.
The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words; he must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.
My career is as an actress. I am an actress playing a comedienne.
After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.
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