Poetry Quotes
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Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
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The Gettysburg Adress has been included, of late, in several anthologies of poetry. It actually meets the major requirement of all poetry: It is a mellifluous and emotional statement of the obviously not true. The men who fought for self-determination at Gettysburg were not the Federals but the Confederates.
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The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
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Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
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While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.
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I write poetry on my iPhone. I've got about 100 poems on there.
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There is something in Poetry beyond Prose-reason; there are Mysteries in it not to be explained, but admired.
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I don't think anybody in my family meant there to be any pressure for me to write. But our parents were incredibly verbal and wrote for a living. The house was full of books, and we all grew up steeped in language. I mean, our mother recited poetry at the dinner table.
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Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.
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We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
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Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
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Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.
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If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.
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I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.
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A lot of them [Germaqn actors] could come in and we could speak for the next nine hours in English and there would be no problem. It was - but it was - English wasn't the language for them to read poetry in. And there is a - there's a poetic quality to my dialogue.
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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.
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Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.
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Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
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One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.
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I like to borrow forms and quotes and use a lot of allusions, in both poetry and music.
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What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.
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In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.
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There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around. That the colt from Old Regret had got away.
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I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.
