"Major poetry not only 'employs' metaphor, irony and other tropes but always and explicitly or implicitly considers the nature of the trope itself."

John Hollander Literature See all quotes by John Hollander →

React to this quote

More by John Hollander

“English Prosody has tended to be a subject for cranks.”

“Contrastive stress is very important in English, as poems are full of invisible italicised contrasts of this kind.”

“You can teach the writing of verse..like prose..an instrument..and the recognition of true poetry. The rest, writers must teach themselves.”

“Poetic form is an abstraction from. or residue of musical form. The ghost of oral poetry never vanishes therefrom.All poetry was originally oral.”

“The large unphilosophical, 'poetic' or 'religious' questions are elicited from their precise and technical microcosms.”

“I usually seem to finish a poem when I write it down. I may have been carrying the notion around in my head.”

Resonant Thoughts

"We might have a chance now to rebuild it all with what we have left. We might have learned that we can exist only as a part of nature, not apart from nature."

— Jane Roberts

Literature1929–1984

#knowledge

"I have the principles of an Englishman, and I utter them without apprehension or reserve...this is not the language of faction; let it be tried by that criterion, by which alone we can distinguish wha…"

— William Pitt

Politics1708–1778

#justice

"f you have a Maxwell demon or something like a Szilard engine in, could you use it, as Maxwell envisaged, to use information to extract energy from De Sitter space and... do... useful work? ... only i…"

— Paul Davies

Science1946

#wisdom

"The story of Eden is a fabrication, bequeathed to us by our well-meaning but dimly-lighted ancestors. There has been no more miracle in the origin of the human species than in the origin of any other …"

— J. Howard Moore

Philosophy1862–1916

#philosophy