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 don't know what is better than the work that is given to the actor - to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself.
The smallest feline is a masterpiece.
All movies assault the viewer in one way or another.
There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.
If I'm inspired to make a certain kind of song, I'm going to make that kind of song, no matter if it's what they know me as or think I am.
Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
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