Vernon Scannell Quotes

As a writer, I must keep writing, poems can never be forced, the muses will not be raped, so I feel this kind of prose (autobiography), however inadequate, share some of the exploratory features of the poetic use of language.

The practice of reading aloud did do something towards attuning my ear .The subtle cadences of Elizabethan blank verse taught me more than the substantial study of English prosody could do at that time.

The poet's need to try to find his own voice , a recognizable individual voice that carries the signature of his voice in almost every line . . . the unique tone being the consequence of the poet's rigorous search for truth ( his truth(, his absolute fidelity to the nature of the experience he was exploring.

The poet , absorbed in the solving of formal problems, the struggle with slippery eels of language, has no time for dissimulation and he tells us more about himself than he knows.

The proper act of reading of a poem was not an act of passive submission but one of collaboration with its author.

The word experiment derives from 'experimentum' - that which has been experienced and what , for the writer , has been experienced is the work of his great predecessors

The best poetry of the second World war written by both British & American servicemen need not fear comparison with the generally more well highly regarded work of the 1914-18 poets.

I was the living proof of T. S Eliot's assertion that poetry can communicate before it is understood.the conscious,analytical part of my response was lulled into a kind of stupor by the rhythms and richness of the imagery of the poetry I was reading.

The servicemen of the 1939 - 45 war could not be disillusioned because they held not illusions to start with, the most common mood found everywhere was one of dour resolution, skeptical, resigned.

I hope this book will throw a little light on the nature of human coutage and its lack..when the last argument of kings viz cannon or war pursues its loud & murderous course.

Past events are not dead but constantly making their claims on the present, modifying it even as they themselves are modified in the maw of subsequent events and in the memory which is part of the shaping of imagination.

The authentic British poetry of the second world war was not a poetry of protest, still less was it inspired by patriotic enthusiasm

The great artist may be, outside the confines of his art, cruel, weak, arrogant and foolish, but within them he can transcend his own condition and become noble, passionate and truthful beyond the range of ordinary men.

A word or a phrase or a line is not a poem. A poem is the exploration and shaping of an experience. A real poem demands intelligence, imagination, passion, understanding, experience and not least a knowledge of the craft.

Some poets are more deeply involved than others in the raw experience which lies behind the poem and for them the act of composition is an act of self exploration with the definite goal of enlightenment rather than the ideally depersonalized construction of a beautiful and autonomous object.