When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
Interpretation
Understanding poetry allows one to gain control over chaos in life.
This quote suggests that engaging deeply with poetry can provide insights and clarity in the midst of life's chaos. By deciphering the complexities and emotions expressed in poems, one develops a greater mastery over the unpredictable nature of existence, finding order and meaning where there might otherwise be confusion.
In practice
In a literature class discussion about the importance of poetry.
Memory exercised in a particular way is a natural gift of poetic genius. The poet above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense impressions which he has experienced and which he can relive again as though with all their original freshness.
The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.
When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes, I was your son, high on your horse, My mind a top whipped by the lashes Of your rhetoric, windy of course.
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
In journalism, a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step.
I have a deep-seated distrust and even contempt for people who are driven by ambition to conquer the world … those who cannot control themselves and produce vast amounts of crap that no one cares about. I find it unattractive. I like the Zen artists: they’d do some work, and then they’d stop for a while.
It is a process of discovery. It's being quiet enough and undisturbed enough for a period of time so that the songs can begin to sort of peek out, and you begin to have emotional experiences in a musical way.
Art is what you can get away with.
It took me two years to walk around a chair with ease; it took me another two years to learn how to laugh onstage - and I had to learn everything.
In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
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