The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel RukeyserRead
The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that poetry originates from a deep inner desire for wholeness and fulfillment.
Muriel Rukeyser suggests that the essence of poetry comes from a profound inner yearning for completeness. It reflects the idea that poetry is not merely an art form but a manifestation of the human spirit striving for connection, understanding, and a sense of entirety in life.
In practice
A speaker at a poetry reading could use this quote to highlight the emotional depth of the works being presented.
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them.
In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.
The town of Gauley Bridge stands as a pattern for all those places where people are linked even in the middle of their suffering, where people fight against an evil condition so that other people need not go through the same fight.
Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.
Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.
Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.
There are other singers of ranchera music who sing very beautifully, but you can tell from the way they sing that they never lived on a ranch. They never knew what it was to milk a cow, to birth a calf, to shoe a horse. I've lived all that.
An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.
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