Life & Mortality Quote by Paul Engle

Engle frames poetry as a wound you choose to keep open. "Verse is not written, it is bled" isn’t just romantic agony; it’s a craft metaphor with a threat inside it: if the work doesn’t cost you something real, it’s probably decorative. The line breaks are blunt, almost declarative, like a rule delivered by someone who’s watched plenty of competent writing fail to become art.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the idea of poems as clever puzzles or genteel ornaments. He insists on a bodily economy: the poem is produced the way blood is produced, by the pressure of living. "Abstract head" is a pointed jab at purely intellectual verse, the kind that stays safely theoretical. Engle doesn’t deny thought; he refuses to let it be the whole engine. The mind supplies form, but the fuel is feeling.

"Words drip the poem on the page" shifts the scene from inspiration to process. Drip is slow, messy, involuntary: this isn’t the fountain-pen myth of effortless genius. It’s closer to endurance, revision, and the grim patience of getting the right line to coagulate.

The last triad - "grief, delight and rage" - matters because it refuses a single-note suffering narrative. Engle is arguing for emotional range as legitimacy: joy can be as ethically demanding as sorrow, anger as formally generative as heartbreak. Contextually, it’s also a midcentury American posture: poetry as lived stakes, not salon performance, a defense of authenticity in an era increasingly suspicious of art that doesn’t leave a mark on its maker.