Official Sung Verse

Famous quotes containing the words official, sung and/or verse:

    All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
    Roland Barthes (1915–1980)

    I smiled at the speech you spoke,
    At your judgement that I heard:
    But I have not often smiled
    Since then, nor questioned since,
    Nor cared for corn-flowers wild,
    Nor sung with the singing bird.
    Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)

    Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)