Vernon Scannell Quotes

The desire of a poet for his writings to be in print is as natural as a painter needs to exhibit his work in public.

In the excitement and rigours of the game or battle with words and shapes, self-interest is mislaid and objective truth may often be revealed.

Ther poetry of the second World War conveys the true feeling of those desolate and desperate days with an urgency and sense of truth that no other means of recording could emulate.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

I believe one of the functions of language used poetically is to explore experiences and hidden sources of behavior in a way that will not be tedious to the reader.

I'm no novelist.Or anything else, I suppose, except, just possibly a poet, once in a while.

The best poetry of WW2 , the most truthful and penetrating, poetry which is rooted in the ground of physical experience, suspicious of the abstract and conforming to the discipline of provenly effective forms.

Of my childhood & youth the greater part of which had been spent in an atmosphere of cultural twilight.

You can find out far more about a writer from his poems or fiction ..because in his stories or poems, his preoccupations, obsessions, moral standards, the quality of his intelligence, his loves, hates, aspirations, belief and fears.. insist on expression.

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