Poetry Quotes
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The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry.
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Since so much of the poetry machine is consumed in and with the mirroring and the reproduction of what is already preexistent, I don't understand why such paranoiac conservatism is dedicated to labels. It's a way of controlling the "other," to label them.
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If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
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It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
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If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.
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I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I've loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.
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There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
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Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success.
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I always loved writing, be it creative writing for school or just poetry. I just loved writing, and in college, I started really trying to write songs and was copying other artists, just to figure it out - but I think freshman year of high school is when I realized, 'I want to be a writer. I have something to say.'
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Ennius was the father of Roman poetry, because he first introduced into Latin the Greek manner and in particular the hexameter metre.
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Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.
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When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and informal manner.
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Poetry allies itself with beauty - a supreme union - but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.
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Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
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I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.
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From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
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Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.
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The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
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My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once.
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My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.
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The Steinway piano - with its beauty and power - is the perfect medium for expressing the performer's art, drama and poetry.
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The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.
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What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
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Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
