Showing posts with label event. Show all posts
Showing posts with label event. Show all posts

event not record

A poem is an event, not a record of an event.

—Robert Lowell

Quoted in Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs (U. of Michigan Press, 1988), edited by Jeffrey Meyers, 304.

should be an event

[Eliot writes in a letter to J.H. Woods, his former professor at Harvard.]

My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.

—T.S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot (vol. I, Harcourt Brace, 1988, p. 285), edited by Valerie Eliot.