A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Interpretation
Poets illuminate truths and provoke thought, challenging the status quo.
This quote by Salman Rushdie emphasizes the role of a poet as a crucial figure in society, tasked with articulating the inexpressible and confronting untruths. By engaging in arguments and sparking discussions, poets not only reflect the world but also influence its direction, urging people to remain awake and aware rather than complacent.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literature, one might quote this to illustrate the power of poetry.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.
They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
The vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out at all. And then it comes out and two reviews are published and it sells 12 copies.
There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has already been made.
People aren't going to support an artist just because they have an audio file. They have to feel a real connection.
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