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I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.
Alice Walker
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Alice Walker emphasizes her identity as a poet, highlighting how this foundational aspect influences her work in novels.

In this quote, Alice Walker reflects on her lifelong identity as a poet, suggesting that her poetic sensibility continues to inform her writing of novels. She implies that her initial artistic expression through poetry shapes her narrative style and thematic exploration in her later work, illustrating the interconnectedness of different forms of creative expression.

Themes

PoetIdentityWritingNovelsArtistic Expression

In practice

Example use cases

In a literary discussion about the importance of poetic language in prose, this quote perfectly illustrates how a poet's background can influence their writing.

More from Alice Walker

Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
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June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
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On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.
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I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
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How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
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One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.
Alice WalkerRead

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