Sherry Chandler » 2008 » January » 19
from a review in the NYTimes:
Poetry provides a moral life the way that standing on a pillar in the desert provides salvation — fine if you have a pillar, and a desert, and a terrific sense of balance; and if not, not.
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When Molière’s Philosophy Master reveals to M. Jourdain that all his life the Bourgeois Gentilhomme has been speaking prose, he muddies a distinction Aristotle would have insisted on. Art imitates nature. As Northrop Frye puts it, art creates “a form of which nature is the content.” The artist may imitate nature more or less closely, for various purposes; but the most “accurate” painting of a mountain is not a mountain. A novel and a poem both imitate speech; neither one is speech.
—Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse. An Essay on Prosody (Northwestern Univ Press, 1980)
This post was written by sherry
