Stephen Burt is an American poet and literary critic. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Belmont and Parallel Play, as well as a book of criticism, The Art of the Sonnet. He is also a professor at Harvard University, where he teaches English and American literature. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Stephen Burt on education, leadership, religion.
- Born
- 1971
- Died
- 970 BC
- Known as
- Poet
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One chance, One life. Make it or screw it up, it's your choice. Don't wait to long or your time will be up.
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Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend.
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In the arts, in places where you're not going to save lives or save species, I think there's no reason to play ball. I can't imagine a serious poet who would want to write or perform for most recent inauguration. I'd be very surprised if there were an inaugural poem, and I can't really imagine what that would be.
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Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.
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Durable, memorable poetry is usually alert to complexity. A really good poem gives you a reason to read it 20 times, because the language in a good poem is doing a lot of work emotionally and a lot of work intellectually. That means durable poetry can help us think about complexity, can help us resist easy answers and help us step back. And it can help us sometimes calm down, and sometimes it can help us stay upset.
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Good poems do a lot of things at once. Often, by doing so, they encourage us to acknowledge mixed and incompatible feelings. Good poems, like good works of history, resist monocausal explanations for anything. There's not one reason why I am angry or excited or hopeful, when I feel those things. And there's not one reason why President Obama won two elections. And there's not one reason why Donald Trump won the most recent presidential election.
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Poetry can explain individuals to ourselves, and change our attitudes, and help us see the complexity of the world, but the kind of poetry I follow isn't going to change public opinion directly. Other art forms can - if you're a TV writer, you have some interesting challenges, or if you're a country musician, somebody like Brad Paisley. But poetry not so much.
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If we recover something like a functioning, well-informed democratic polity - if it hasn't been wrecked for good by the people who are getting in now, if millennials and teenagers can come to maturity in a world where we hold free and fair elections and agree on what fact is - Lin-Manuel Miranda is going to have a lot to do with that.
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"Poetry" refers to the quite challenging and quite resistant sets of words put together to be admired and interpreted by people who are already into that sort of thing, somewhat analogous to free jazz or academic classical music. Which is stuff that I really like, but is late modernist and is going to have a limited audience.
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In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.
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To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical.
Life Lessons by Stephen Burt
- Stephen Burt's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and appreciating the beauty of the everyday, from the mundane to the extraordinary.
- His poetry encourages readers to explore the complexities of life and to find joy in the little moments.
- He also emphasizes the importance of being open to new experiences and ideas, and of being able to appreciate the beauty in the world around us.