How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Interpretation
Poetry is deeply influenced by personal experiences and life events.
The quote emphasizes that poetry is not just a creation of imagination but is rooted in the experiences, emotions, and events that one encounters in life. Robert Penn Warren suggests that the authenticity of poems stems from the lived experiences of individuals, indicating that personal growth and life narratives serve as the fertile ground from which poetry emerges.
In practice
In a writing workshop, when discussing the origin of creative works, one could say, 'As Robert Penn Warren noted, poems grow out of your life.'
...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.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
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.
I grew up like Athena β covered with playing cards instead of armor β and, at the age of seven, materialized on a TV show, doing magic.
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
Simplicity is the glory of expression.
The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.
I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.
Poetry must be human. If it is not human, it is not poetry.
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