Poetry Quotes
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The reason why we do maths is because it's like poetry. It's about patterns, and that really turned me on. It made me feel that maths was in tune with the other things I liked doing.
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Any extreme political creed brought only darkness in the long run; it lit up nothing. The best politics were those of caution, tolerance and moderation, Angus maintained, but such politics were, alas, also very dull, and certainly moved nobody to poetry.
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And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.
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It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.
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I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
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All of the arts are kin - music and sculpture and dance, those are wordless art forms. But poetry is defined by language. Of course, each art is distinct, and has its own character - not just in terms of media, but in terms of what seems to lie at the heart of it.
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I write poetry, and I put it to a beat - I mean, that's what they call rap.
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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
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Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
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It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
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The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.
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Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.
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When I attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, I was very inspired. The collaboration of many poets from these alternative traditions - though there were not enough women - who were very much more influenced by, say, Asian forms or by Mantra or by thinking politically through their work in deeper ways really stuck with me.
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It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
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I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
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Poetry is meant to be heard.
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Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.
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And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.
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Reform and exchange in English poetry are as slow as in the British constitution itself.
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When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
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Technical display in Chopin, after the early works, is transmuted into tone color or dramatic gesture-we may say, to accept the prejudices of Chopin's own generation, that it has been ennobled. This is the source of much of the poetry in Chopin's music: it comes from the transformation of the vulgar into something aristocratic.
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The residue of religion in my work appears as a modified transcendentalism, and the positivist scientific side of my thought appears as concreteness and realism. The effort to reconcile the two is at the core of all my poetry.
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I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.
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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.
