Poetry Quotes
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By means of Invocation, the being awakens, and awakening becomes fullness. By means of balancing, fullness becomes internal wholeness. By virtue of exteriorized attention, internal wholeness becomes Communion. By virtue of self-forgetfulness, Communion becomes Union.
David Truman
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Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters' crumbs!
Friedrich Nietzsche
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You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
Theodore Roethke
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Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.
Robert Frost
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I'd advise all you songwriters out there, if you're getting into it for the business, go home and get a job digging ditches or something. Get a life. You'll learn a lot more, and you won't write a lot of rotten poetry.
Butch Hancock
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If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.
John F. Kennedy
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When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
Billy Collins
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One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.
John Updike
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My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.
Dylan Walsh
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We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.
Edouard Glissant
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Who needs poetry? All of us do. Poetry has always been the voice of the inner self, the carrier of revelations, dreams, and visions that often defy expression in ordinary prose.
Jane Roberts
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A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
Chaim Potok
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And any stone being mentally handled must become endowed with such poetry and artistry as God has given you.
Edwin Lutyens
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When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Marilyn Hacker
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Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.
John McWhorter
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Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feelings, reviews the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human mature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.
William Ellery Channing
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Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band, because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.
Thurston Moore
Sonic Youth
