Quotes

Question 1

Gulliver’s Travels: Brobdingnag on humans

Answer 1

‘I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffers to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth’

Question 2

Pound on the medium of drama

Answer 2

‘The medium of drama is not words, but persons moving about on a stage using words’

Question 3

Socrates on tragedy and comedy at end of Symyposium defends wild paradox that

Answer 3

‘The same person is able to compose both tragedy and comedy and that the foundations of the tragic and the comic arts were essentially the same’

Question 4

Keats quote

Answer 4

‘I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination’

Question 5

Sartre

Answer 5

‘Man always makes something out of what is made of him’

Question 6

Hawking

Answer 6

‘Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?’

Question 7

Kierkegaard

Answer 7

‘Truth, is subjectivity’

Question 8

De Quincey

Answer 8

‘Poetry can only teach as nature teaches, by hieroglyphic suggestion’

Question 9

Alexander Pope on praise

Answer 9

‘Praise undeserv’d is scandal in disguise’

Question 10

Walt Whitman

Answer 10

‘Who touches this book touches a man’

Question 11

Whitman - contradiction

Answer 11

‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself’

Question 12

The poet Nennius

Answer 12

‘I have made a great heap of all I have found’

Question 13

Thatcher 1987

Answer 13

‘There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women… and the qualities of our lives will depend upon how each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.’

Question 14

Charles Olson

Answer 14

Poems as a ‘flow of energy’

Question 15

Eliot 1950 lecture - asserts audiences should be made to hear verse

Answer 15

‘From people dressed like ourselves, living in houses and apartments like ours, and using telephones and motorcars and radio sets’

Question 16

Horatio

Answer 16

‘The sorrow of true love d is a great sorrow / so have I heard, and do in part believe’

Question 17

Frost on poetry

Answer 17

‘Begins in delight and ends in wisdom’

Question 18

Donald Davie, Articulate Energy 1966

Answer 18

‘Language contains everything you want… language reveals life’

Question 19

Eliot - words and meanings

Answer 19

‘The intolerable wrestle/with words and meanings’

Question 20

Haraway cyborg

Answer 20

‘The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity’

Question 21

In a Station of the Metro

Answer 21

‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough’

Question 22

Donna Haraway ‘cyborg theory’ 1991

Answer 22

A hybrid entity, part human part machine, made up of ‘transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities’

Question 23

Alice Oswald on American poets

Answer 23

They ‘seem to articulate indecision, as if the poem was writing itself in an unfinished moment’

Question 24

Pound’s image definition

Answer 24

‘An intellectually and emotional complex in an instant of time’

Question 25

Judith Butler on gender

Answer 25

‘Gender is an “act” broadly construed, which constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority’

Question 26

John Berger, says of seeing 1972 cultural norms are:

Answer 26

‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ women ‘depicted in a different way to men, because the “ideal” spectator is always assumed to be male and the image designed to flatter him’

Question 27

Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘White Paintings’ 1951

Answer 27

Cage memorably said they were like ‘mirrors of the air’

Question 28

John Cage’s 1951 composition

Answer 28

4’33 (four minutes thirty three seconds) - pianist sits in front of piano without playing it - audience listens to ambient noises of the concert hall

Question 29

Laura Mulvey - ‘The male gaze’ 1975 essay

Answer 29

In her essay ‘visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ she talks of the ‘controlling male gaze’ which presents ‘women as image or spectacle’ and men as ‘bearer of the look’

Question 30

Lord Byron on laughter

Answer 30

‘Do you suppose that I could have any intention but to giggle and make giggle?’

Question 31

Architect Ludwig mies Vander Rohe

Answer 31

‘less is more’

Question 32

Archibald MacLeish in ars’ poetica’s closing lines

Answer 32

‘a poem should not mean / but be’

Question 33

Julian Barnes

Answer 33

‘Art tends, sooner or later, to float free of biography’

Question 34

Kenneth Clarke

Answer 34

Distinguished between the ‘naked’ (raw corporeal body) and the ‘nude’ (the body as represented in art)

Question 35

Adolf Loos

Answer 35

‘Decoration is a Crime’ announces in his 1908 collection of essays ‘ornament and crime’

Question 36

Gwyneth Lewis

Answer 36

‘a poem is a translation for which there is no original’

Question 37

William Cowper on the mock heroic

Answer 37

‘Big words on small matters’

Question 38

Horace Walpole quote

Answer 38

‘The world is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel’

Question 39

Dostoevsky quote

Answer 39

‘Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering: that is a fact’

Question 40

Beckett

Answer 40

‘Speech is a desecration of silence’

Question 41

Aristotle on mimesis

Answer 41

‘Simulated representation’

Question 42

JFK after Martin Luther King assassination April 1968

Answer 42

Quotes Aeschylus’ Oresteia - ‘and even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of god’
- the chorus of city elders ponder the meaning of violence and suffering

Question 43

Pound’s definition of literature

Answer 43

‘News which stays news’

Question 44

Literature as of timeless significance, transcending limitations of age it was written in, thereby speaks to what is constant in human nature.

Answer 44

Such writing is ‘not for an age, but for all time’ (Ben Johnson on Shakespeare)

‘News which stays news’ (pound’s definition of literature’