Poetry Quotes
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People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
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And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
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History, at least in its ideal state of perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy.
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Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.
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I wrote a lot of poetry when I was a teenager - mostly desperate love poetry!
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Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.
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It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has been foisted upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with separate 'particulars,' for such rows do not exist.
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Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
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Poetry’s a mere drug, Sir.
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Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone.
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I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.
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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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For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.
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'NewsHour' is very interested in poetry, but they're also interested in not just that something's cute to add on at the end of their programming, but something that actually is integrated into the news.
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The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.
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I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives - philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.
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If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism.
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Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.
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We have the ability to be the Athens of modern times as opposed to the militaristic Sparta. I remind you that the Athenians wrote poetry. The Spartans did not.
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We'd like to just write nothing but lyric poetry. The trouble is, the individual is going along intent on his own personal gratifications and love affairs and financial affairs and everything else. But loping alongside him is this fascist lout who keeps trying to take over. And if you keep ignoring him, he gets bigger and bigger, so every once in a while the free individual has to turn away from his private pursuits and give this fascist lout a few clouts, and beat him down to size.
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I guess it was easier for me to find my voice in poetry than it was in fiction. I'm working on fiction again, and I find it a lot more difficult. It's a struggle. At a certain point, you have your voice and you go to it every time, so it's not like reinventing the wheel. That's the way I see it at least.
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I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.
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I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.
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It was through poetry I learned just to appreciate my own voice and to not think of my voice in terms of what it needs to be able to do, but what it can do.
