For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Interpretation
A poem serves as a personal exploration of one's self, revealing deep truths about the individual through creative expression.
In this quote, Robert Penn Warren suggests that poetry is more than just a form of art; it is a brave effort to understand oneself. By crafting a poem, the poet engages in a risky journey of introspection, sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings, and essentially documenting their personal narrative in an artistic way.
In practice
During a poetry reading, one might use this quote to introduce their own work, emphasizing personal reflection.
...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.
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
And its object is Art not power, sub-creation not domination and tyrannous re-forming of Creation.
I understand that people want to just listen to a track and put it on their iPod, and that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that, but why can't that exist hand in hand with an album? They're such different experiences.
When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.
That was the appealing thing about comics: There literally is no budget in comics. You're only limited by your imagination.
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time.
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