How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Interpretation
Poetry is deeply influenced by personal experiences and life events.
The quote emphasizes that poetry is not just a creation of imagination but is rooted in the experiences, emotions, and events that one encounters in life. Robert Penn Warren suggests that the authenticity of poems stems from the lived experiences of individuals, indicating that personal growth and life narratives serve as the fertile ground from which poetry emerges.
In practice
In a writing workshop, when discussing the origin of creative works, one could say, 'As Robert Penn Warren noted, poems grow out of your life.'
...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.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
In some ways I believe music is the more convincing communicator of ideas than words. For instance, we can hear of Kordaly and Bartok and recognise them as Hungarian, but very few of us speak Hungarian, but the music itself speaks to more people.
It's weird that, in a way, by writing about video games, I get to develop them, too.
An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.
Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don't expect anything from anybody.
It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
Nothing is art if it does not come from nature.
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