10
" Yeats—himself, we should note, deeply involved with the struggle for Irish independence—once said, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” On the other side of the question, many feel that the abrasions of history upon, within, and against individual lives have been part of poetry’s domain from the start, and that whatever affects a person belongs in poems, and can be joined there to all the rest—the emotional with the intellectual; the personal with the social; the public and the private; the natural world and the humanly made; the coldness of stone and the humanly felt; the knowledge of violent injustice and the longing for lyrical transcendence. "
― Jane Hirshfield , Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
11
" What surprises, etymology tells us, is what is “beyond grasp.” Even the mind of the author cannot seem to keep what has been found: great poems exceed their creators. They are more capacious, capricious, compassionate, original, witty, strange, avaricious for beauty and range. The writer’s life, the historical times, do not make the art. Art makes art. "
― Jane Hirshfield , Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
