Jean Bowen

“What is originality in art? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not and this may be done by saying that it is never a willful rejection of what has been accepted as the necessary laws of various forms of art. Thus in reasoning originality relies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions. In poetry originality consists not in discarding the necessary laws of rhythm but in finding new rhythms within the limits of those laws.”
― Edith Wharton, The Decoration Of Houses

“It seems to me what that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysterious. The problem is to make a whole that does not foreit this power.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“Wifehood, the house, a family they are woman's traditional concern and each in its way represents one of the other great three- faith, hope, charity - which St. Paul sets down as the virtues of earth. (For how can one rear a family without faith? Or build a roof without hope? Or remain a proper wife without charity?) They are life's most vital elements and no ordered world can endure without them.”
― Phyllis McGinley, Sixpence in Her Shoe

“I'm attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen; for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied. . .”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry