A Quote from Oscar Wilde: (which might imply that I know something about the man or that I am familiar with his work, which I am not, this quote coming off some Google “quote of the day” page, I wouldn’t want anybody to get the wrong idea, like I know what I am talking about or anything. I am currently reading D.F. Wallace so I am really pushing this whole “meta” thing, which is of course referenced in the title of my blog “Meta .44”) Oh yeah, The Quote:
“A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets make a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.”
I was going to make some comments about it but I no longer want to. What do you think?
3 comments:
Ok. I think i have the perfect response to this. My brother just sent me this poem and i cringe a little bit to put it out there, but it seems like Oscar may have been talking about him:
"God Bless America
I pledge allegiance to the farce
Of the divided fragments of debauchery
And to the profit
For which it gains me
One purpose, without God
separated, with tyranny and power for one.
Colors that were meant to bind us
have become precise measures of division
red versus blue with white left to flap
in the breeze- how perfect that it should mean
truce, surrender; “I give up!”
The ties that once would bind us now do so
as shackles, not blankets of security
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
It’s been said that those that don’t learn from history
are doomed to repeat it.
Class remains in session
Pop Quiz: How many innocent lives
does it take to justify victory?
Question two: If “democracy” is
a government of the people, by the people,
and for the people, who are the people?
This is not a riddle, and this is a test
You will be graded
Guns are bad, guns are good
Guns are tools to build a new democracy
In a land where we don’t belong
Guns are the instrument through which
Disturbed, disenfranchised, devalued young people
Cry out for help
We cheer one cause, deride the other
One is a just, righteous cause, the other…
Let’s not discuss it
But be sure to tune in tonight at six
For all the news that’s fit to disturb
~S. Swanson
4/27/07
I am slightly confused by this Oscar quote. Partially because I cannot understand whether he is talking about the 'others' as the great poets or the inferior poets. I believe he is referencing the great poets because there are so few of them and would be generally considered one of the 'others'. I am curious though, how would this quote apply to my poems?
if i am living in a poem, i think shel silverstein wrote it.
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