Quotes from ANNA BALAKIAN

Literature is an act which gives meaning to experience.

I have never been able to draw a line between work and pleasure.

Blake has been admired by the surrealists because like them he made of poetry a way of life: his pictorial and poetic imagery was the overflow of a spiritual crisis and his art asserted man's creative capacities.

Art, even as poetry, was to become not an escape from the narrowness of lived reality, but the overflow of intensified life.

The object of linguistics is language; that of poetics is concrete utterance. Language is an institution, a formal system which constitutes, for the hypothetical speaker, a "competence"; it is a virtual object. Speech (the poetic utterance, for our purposes) is an individual act which formulates a concrete discourse; it is a "performance".

The artist's mind and eye, as the poet's, were subjected to rigorous training. Henceforth, the artist's hands were to create the objects projected from his mind, after its process of selection and alchemy.

Symbolism, originally intended as a countermovement to naturalism, actually turned out to be a variation of it rather than its antithesis.

The ideal of musicality belongs to the stylistic layer of Symbolism, for music in literature is a function of language, of style. It is the stylistic element which is the most deeply rooted in the aesthetics and value-hierarchy of the Symbolist movement, and one which graphically illustrates the interrelatedness of ideas and of style, and the possibility of expressing ideas through the medium of art.