Tragic Poetry Quotes & Sayings

Oh, Darcy!' Fitz grabbed Darcy by the collar. 'You have such a way with the ladies. — Elizabeth Eulberg

Perhaps Aristotle's most widely-read work is his esoteric treatise on aesthetics, the Poetics. According to his analysis of tragic poetry (a section on comedy was either lost or never completed), the theatrical audience experiences katharsis ("purgation") of the heightened emotions of pity and fear as the tragic hero, a basically good but flawed aristocrat, is brought down by his own "error of judgment. — The New York Times

Plato utterly condemns the poets for publishing trivial, false and indeed wicked stories about the gods, such as that they fight with each other, or are overcome by emotions like grief, anger, mirth. Reluctantly, he will not allow Homer in his Republic, and he is very angry with the tragic poets for spreading unworthy ideas of the Deity.

It may well be that there were inferior tragic poets who deserved Plato's strictures, but so far as concerns the tragic poets whom we know, Plato's attack is absurd. It is the attack of a severely intellectual philosopher who was also more of a poet than most poets have contrived to be; one who invented some of the profoundest and most beautiful of Greek myths. 'There is a long-standing quarrel', says Plato, 'between philosophy and poetry.' So there was, on the part of the philosophers, and most of all in Plato's own soul. — H.D.F. Kitto

No artist has painted
A true portrait of Lenin
Ages to come will complete
Lenin's unfinished portrait.
Did Poletaev understand the tragic implication of his lines about Lenin? (pg179) — Vasily Grossman

Romantic haste in drama brings
tears and sighs when the hero dies
but the curtain fall is final
when in life we take the tragic way
The sunset too is a glorious thing
but with it ends the day. — C. P. Klapper

I had nothing to say to these words: they were not new to me: my very first recollections of existence included hints of the same kind. This reproach of my dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear: very painful and crushing, but only half intelligible. — Charlotte Bronte

Choose wisely
From those who start
A fire in your heart.

Some may burn you to shreds,
While you were looking for warmth. — Saiber

His maleness bores me. Nothing is so boring as the phallus, so inherently stupid and stupidly conceited. — D.H. Lawrence

It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life ... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death
subjects as ancient as humanity
these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak. — Louise Bogan

When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back. — James Fenton

Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab - its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians - none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we're indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he's the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him. — Diana Abu-Jaber

She thought men were saviors ...
... And she looked for more in them than what they were ...
Only to rescue herself from those she wished would rescue her ...
And isn't that the most tragic lie ...
The lie where we tell what we wished were true and believe it ... ?
She had an artificial memory, a prosthesis to a past that never was ...
She was like a party that no one ever went to ...
Like a cure ... without a disease ...
And isn't that the greatest fear of all ... to be ready with the answers
to questions that no one asks anymore? — Merrit Malloy

The wonderful poems interpreting with equal magic the romance of strange lands and times, or the modern soul, naked and unashamed, as if clothed in its own complexity; the humorous-tragic questionings of the universe; the delicious travel-pictures and fantasies; the lucid criticisms of art, and politics, and philosophy, informed with malicious wisdom, shimmering with poetry and wit. — Israel Zangwill

back in the middle ages
they burned unruly women at the stake
and out of the ashes of their bones and flesh
rose the Enlightenment and Reason fresh
and the white men declared
there's no such thing as witches
they're just crazy psycho-bitches
but we certainly can't let them run free
lock 'em up and throw away the key
yeah they said: lock 'em up and throw away the key

cause there's nothing scarier than a woman mad and/or
aware of her own magic
tragic how much violence is done
in the name of science
to ensure our silence

in Victorian times they located suffering in our uterus
in the blood in the soft internal organs
took our pain our righteous rage
they called it 'hysteria'
and then Dr. Freud ignored women's horror stories
herstories of abuse and rape and
took a justified hatred of the penis and called it
envy (he sold more books that way) — Leah Harris

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?"
Macbeth — William Shakespeare

If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn't write a single word, but that would be tragic. — Dejan Stojanovic

For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality! — Ellen Key

If I can make a career for myself after Potter, and it goes well, and is varied and with longevity, then that puts to bed the 'child actors argument'. — Daniel Radcliffe

Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but that we aim too low and hit. — Aristotle.

For every in-breath there is an out-breath, and as these two currents meet in the nose, a fine microclimate is set up. — Gay Hendricks

The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, - the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Trying to pump breath into a fairy tale is as arduous and tragic as ancient Greek theatre. — Terry A. O'Neal