Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on How a Poem Finds ‘Its Place in the Language’)

“It takes time for any poem to grow and ripen and find its place in the language.  It will be for those of a hundred or more years hence to say what are the great poems of our present day.  If a sonnet has the true vitality in it, it will gather association and richness about it as it traces its slender golden path through the minds of readers.  It settles itself comfortably into the literary landscape, incorporates itself subtly into the unconscious thought of men, becomes corpuscular in the blood of the language.  It comes down to us in the accent of those who have loved and quoted it, invigorated by our subtle sense of the permanent rightness of its phrasing and our knowledge of the pleasure it has given to thousands of others.  The more it is quoted, the better it seems.” — American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), “The Permanence of Poetry,” in Plum Pudding (1921)