Susan Stewart Quotes & Sayings

The most important American love poet in living memory, and certainly one of the most important American poets tout court, Robert Creeley was born in 1926 and raised in eastern Massachusetts. — Susan Stewart

More often writing soliloquies of suffering and consolation than collective songs like the dirge, elegists have discovered that lyric sequences can provide a powerful means of addressing the tensions between grief's inchoate emotion and social rituals of mourning. — Susan Stewart

To toy with something is to manipulate it, to try it out within sets of contexts none of which is determinate. — Susan Stewart

The power of elegy, even in the face of an unbounded grief, to provide a containing form is vividly embodied by Anne Carson's 'Nox,' a nocturne with carefully controlled visual and tactile properties. — Susan Stewart

The closure of the book is an illusion largely created by its materiality, its cover. Once the book is considered on the plane of its significance, it threatens infinity. — Susan Stewart

Poets writing in English have long learned to mourn from classical precedents. They have drawn on a tradition of pastoral elegies, which incorporate the dead into the cycles of nature, that runs from Theocritus' Idylls to John Milton's 'Lycidas' and Percy Shelley's 'Adonais.' — Susan Stewart

In the Novel

He described her mouth as full of ashes.
So when he kissed her finally
he was thinking about ashes

and the blacker rim just below
the edge of the ashtray,
and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips,

and the lips themselves, at the limit
of another darkness, farther
and far more interior.

Then the way the red,
paling, just outside those lines
caught fire and the pages caught

soon after that. Slowly at first,
but then all at once
at the scalloped brown corners of each;

like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird,
extended, then folded
in on itself; multiple,

stiffening, gone. — Susan Stewart

The voice of a person thinking, discovering, revising, is ever-present without any loss in grace or ease. — Susan Stewart

As traditions of mourning wane, women's role as designated mourners has also vanished. In consequence, the woman elegist must summon her own resources as an artist. — Susan Stewart

The length and shape of the poemetto, like the greater Romantic lyric of English poetry, lends itself to retrospection and commentary. — Susan Stewart

Umberto Poli was born in Trieste in 1883, when the city was at its zenith as the major port of the Habsburgs. The irredentist sympathies of Umberto's Italian-speaking parents can be detected in their giving him the first name of the Italian emperor. — Susan Stewart