Vernon Scannell Quotes

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 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 impulse to create is pure, self sufficient, its own reward or punishment.

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.

All I am is in my verse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Whether we are writing prose or verse we must never use language in a merely decorative way, every qualifying word, every adjective and adverb must be carefully inspected & weighed before it is used and ask before its use , is it really necessary.

All true poets are, of course, primarily concerned with artifact, the making of a verbal construct, a durable work of art.

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

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.

Well, here I suppose is my life, or part of it, by which I would wish to be judged... poems which have been written from a sense of compulsion, a real need to explore and articulate experiences which have been important to me.

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.