Thomas Harrison Quotes

"With the question of the effect of a poem, the topic of investigation shifts from that of textual autonomy to textual reception - to the issue of what we actually look for or find in reading a poem."
- Thomas Harrison
(Related: Effect, Investigation, Question, Reading)

"Unlike metaphor, metonymy does not try to fuse images together."
- Thomas Harrison
(Related: Metaphor)

"Other, far fewer, directors are more like the composer - conceptualizing the piece, scoring it, distributing its musical lines among a range of registers, chords, and instruments."
- Thomas Harrison

"Still the question remains of what actually speaks in a poem, if not subjectivity as historically constructed."
- Thomas Harrison
(Related: Question)

"No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern."
- Thomas Harrison
(Related: Art, Poetry, Concern, Language, Originality)

"In an age where history is recorded on T-shirts, the very notion of dwelling on the deep structure of an experience has come to appear both arcane and archaic."
- Thomas Harrison
(Related: Age, Experience, History, Deep)

"To liberate words means first to shatter their function as vehicles of idea, memory, hope, or regret."
- Thomas Harrison
(Related: Idea, Hope, First, Memory, Regret, Words)

"Experience has ceded to a series of happenings, about which the most we can expect is information."
- Thomas Harrison
(Related: Experience, Information)

"As witnesses that the things were not done in a corner."
- Thomas Harrison

"A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense."
- Thomas Harrison
(Related: Sense)

"A jacket commemorating the Germans as champions of the 1990 World Cup is out of date two weeks after the event has passed."
- Thomas Harrison
(Related: World)

"In recent decades this symbolic or metaphorical lyric has given way to one which leans toward metonymy."
- Thomas Harrison