{"id":504,"date":"2010-06-15T09:00:56","date_gmt":"2010-06-15T13:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/?p=504"},"modified":"2010-06-14T09:22:00","modified_gmt":"2010-06-14T13:22:00","slug":"borges-on-poetry-and-the-commonplace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/15\/borges-on-poetry-and-the-commonplace\/","title":{"rendered":"Borges on Poetry and the Commonplace"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>[Robert Louis Stevenson] says that, in a sense, poetry is nearer to the common man, the man in  the street. For the materials of poetry are words, and those words are,  he says, the very dialect of life. Words are used for everyday humdrum purposes and are the material of the poet, even as sounds are the  material of the musician. Stevenson speaks of words as being mere  blocks, mere conveniences. Then he wonders at the poet, who is able to  weave those rigid symbols meant for everyday or abstract purposes into a  pattern, which he calls &#8220;the web.&#8221; If we accept what Stevenson says, we have a theory of poetry\u00e2\u20ac\u201da theory of words being made by literature to  serve for something beyond their intended use. Words, says Stevenson, are meant for the common everyday commerce of life, and the poet somehow makes of them something magic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u201dJorge Luis Borges, from his lecture <em>Thought and Poetry<\/em>, given at Harvard in 1967 and collected in <em>This Craft of Verse<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Robert Louis Stevenson] says that, in a sense, poetry is nearer to the common man, the man in the street. For the materials of poetry are words, and those words are, he says, the very dialect of life. Words are used for everyday humdrum purposes and are the material of the poet, even as sounds [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulboccaccio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. The path to wp-cache-phase1.php in wp-content/advanced-cache.php must be fixed! -->