Cleanth Quotes & Sayings

The poet wants to 'say' something. Why, then, doesn't he say it directly and fortrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether. — Cleanth Brooks

Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population. — Svetlana Alexievich

The overall effect of the GEA will be to increase unit production costs, diminish competitiveness, cut the rate of return to capital in key sectors, reduce employment, and make households worse off, — Ross McKitrick

If she were to die, it would be out here. Not that she wanted to die. She really didn't. She just felt suddenly like she needed, wanted more. There had to be more to life besides the constant training, orders, the rules, having every move you ever made watched and recorded. There had to be more. More what she didn't know, but she wanted it. — Jessica Jaster

The best of the New Critics were masters of close readings. Cleanth Brooks, for example, in 1937 wrote a detailed commentary on The Waste Land which is still a model of critical helpfulness. The fact that certain basic insights in the past generation have originated as reactions against Brooks and his colleagues does not in any way diminish their excellence. — Jewel Spears Brooker

What Shelley's world of Prometheus Unbound really has to fear is not resurrection of Jupiter but the resurrection of John Donne. — Cleanth Brooks

Man's experience is indeed a seamless garment, no part of which can be separated from the rest. — Cleanth Brooks

Is it possible to make a sharp distinction between the content and the the form, between the personality of the Texas auctioneer and the language that he uses? Are not our attitudes toward people and events in great part shaped by the very language in which we describe them? When we try to describe one person to another or to a group, what do we say? Not usually how or what that person ate, rarely what he wore, only occasionally how he managed his job
no, what we tell is what he said and, if we are good mimics, how he said it. We apparently consider a person's spoken words the true essence of his being. — Cleanth Brooks

Writing is putting one's obsessions in order. — Jean Grenier

If we allow ourselves to be misled by the heresy of paraphrase, we run the risk of doing even more violence to the internal order of the poem itself. By taking the paraphrase as our point of stance, we misconceive the function of metaphor and meter. We demand logical coherences where they are sometimes irrelevant, and we fail frequently to see imaginative coherences on levels where they are highly relevant. — Cleanth Brooks

Stick to your instincts. — Tina Weymouth