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Poetry

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TheSanityInspector

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Oct 6, 2020, 12:55:45 PM10/6/20
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My taste in poetry is for delicate and fragile things—to honest, for artificial things. I like a frail but perfectly articulated stanza, a sonnet wrought like ivory, a song full of glowing nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions and participles, but without much hard sense to it. Poetry, to me, has but two meanings. On the one hand, it is a magical escape from the sordidness of metabolism and the class war, and on the other hand it is a subtle, very difficult and hence very charming art, like writing fugues or mixing mayonnaise. I do not go to poets to be taught anything, or to heated up to indignation, or to have my conscience blasted out of its torpor, but to soothed and caressed, to be lulled with sweet sounds, to be wooed into forgetfulness, to be tickled under the metaphysical chin.

-- H. L. Mencken, Damn! A Book Of Calumny, 1918

--
bruce
The dignified don't even enter in the game.
-- The Jam
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