Poetry Quotes
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Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation.
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Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen. These two arts, you may call them both either poetry or painting, have here interchanged the senses by which they penetrate to the intellect.
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Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot.
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So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
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Poetry is meant to be heard.
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Poetry is a principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing.
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I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
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The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.
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One is forced to remember how far from 'self-expression' great poems are - what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent.
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Poetry is what gets lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.
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It's always good to show that poetry isn't the little depressed lyric people believe it to be, that it's something bigger.
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Everybody must have wished at some time that poetry were written by nice ordinary people instead of poets-and, in a better world, it may be; but in this world writers like Constance Carrier are the well oysters that don’t have the pearls.
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Never forget that the subject is as important as your feeling; the mud puddle itself is as important as your pleasure in looking at it or splashing through it. Never let the mud puddle get lost in the poetry-because, in many ways, the mud puddle is the poetry.
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Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
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Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.
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The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.
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As a kid, I loved 'Godot' because of the poetry and the humor and the strangeness, but then as you get older, it's much more resonant.
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Compose aloud: poetry is a sound.
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I love poetry. If my mind gets a bit tight or bound up with information or depressed with bad news, I find a good book of poetry is like going to the gym for an hour. My mind just expands.
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People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
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Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard ... All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy.
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One of the uses of poetry - one says it to oneself in distressing circumstances, ... or when one has to wait at railway stations, or when one cannot get to sleep at night.
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I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
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I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted, and completely crippled . . . In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.
