Poetry Quotes
-
I think that I have less conviction than ever that poetry matters - that poetry changes or saves anything or anyone. But, in fact, that's tremendously freeing. If it doesn't matter much, the stakes are lower and you can't really fail. It's insurrection. It's a tiny alphabet revolution. A secret. A psalm.
-
We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
-
From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry.
-
Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.
-
I opened my veins. Unstoppably life spurts out with no remedy. Now I set out bowls and plates. Every bowl will be shallow. Every plate will be small. And overflowing their rims, into the black earth, to nourish the rushes unstoppably without cure, gushes poetry.
-
Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
-
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
-
Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
-
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
-
I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.
-
Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.
-
Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.
-
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
-
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
-
I didn't write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.
-
But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.
-
There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.
-
The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.
-
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
-
Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
-
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
-
When trying to explain anything, I usually find that the Bible, that great collection of magnificent and varied poetry, has said it before in the best possible way.
-
In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.
-
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
