Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Tippett

Tippett is describing poetry less as a genre than as a phase-change: the instant language gets rhythmic, charged, and intentionally shaped, the subject stops being mere “thing” and becomes “something extra.” Coming from a composer, that “extra” reads like resonance - the overtones you can’t point to directly but can feel in the room. He’s interested in the moment when technique turns into transformation, when form doesn’t decorate meaning but alters it.

The sly move is his refusal to police the border between prose and poetry. “Somehow prose can go over into poetry” shrugs at the gatekeepers. It implies poetry isn’t an elite club of line breaks and elevated diction; it’s a condition that can seize ordinary speech when attention sharpens. Tippett’s “somehow” matters: he treats the mechanism as partly mysterious, like the way a motif repeats in music until it suddenly means something new. You can analyze it, but the effect still arrives like a surprise.

Contextually, Tippett lived through a century that mistrusted grand rhetoric (two world wars will do that) yet kept searching for ways to make art carry moral and emotional complexity without turning into propaganda. His own work often fused public themes with inward lyricism. This quote fits: poetry is “fascinating” because it’s the technology of intensification, a way to convert report into experience. Prose tells you what happened; poetry makes the happening happen again, with a pulse.