Louis Untermeyer
American poet, anthologist, and critic
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Every poet knows the pun is Pierian, that it springs from the same soil as the Muse ... a matching and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance.
—Louis Untermeyer, American poet and anthologist, Bygones, 1965
Posted on October 14, 1999 at 3:02 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The fruit grower ... capitalizes the power of poetry by saying that [his oranges] are Sunkist, a conceit worthy of the Elizabethan singers ... The architect daringly suggests the tower of Babel with the 'skyscraper'; the man in the street intensifies his speech by tightening it into slang, the shorthand of the people, by 'crashing' a party, 'muscling' in, 'hitting' the high spots. Language is continually being made swift and powerful through the medium of the poetic phrase.
—Louis Untermeyer, American poet, anthologist, and critic, quoted in An Exaltation of Larks, by James Lipton, 1968
Posted on October 17, 2000 at 8:49 AM
|
