Poetry Quotes

• There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it.

  

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Thinking
  • Illustration
  • Allegory

• One of the things called forth by the Imagist movement in poetry was neatness; and when we say keenness, we mean neatness. A knife that is keen is also a knife that cuts neatly; it isn't brutal. Sharpness is different from brutality. Brutality is clumsy: it is wide - it has a lot of fist and thumb and no delicate finger.

  

  Eli Siegel
  • Brutality
  • Thumb
  • Neatness

• But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

  

  Jeffery Deaver
  • Writing
  • Poetry

• Howard Altmann has found a way to make language transform itself. If the elusive moment between I and Thou could speak, it might be one of his quietly amazing lines-'you ask the silence to invert itself / like a gymnast in the dark . . . ' Without a trace of rhetoric, In This House reminds us of the power of poetry: to show us how to live in a world in which we are strangers. It's a thrill to come close to such an original and deeply realized art.

  

  Dennis Nurkse
  • Language
  • Silence
  • Speak

• I've been surprised to learn how many people love poetry. It's beautiful to see that people want poetry in their lives.

  

  Peleg Top
  • People
  • Beautiful
  • Poetry

• The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.

  

  Marilynne Robinson
  • Truth
  • Knowledge
  • Poetry

• Painting is silent poetry.

  

  Plutarch
  • Poetry
  • Painting

• In Bonn, where I studied for a year, I changed from classical to Romance philology, taught there by its great founder, F. Diez, and at the beginning of 1852, I received the doctorate for a dissertation on the refrain in Provencal poetry.

  

  Paul Heyse
  • Poetry
  • Dissertation
  • Philology

• Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

  

  C.D. Wright
  • Death
  • Die
  • Expression

• All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

  

  Honore de Balzac
  • Poetry
  • Vision
  • Proceeds

• The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.

  

  W. H. Auden
  • Music
  • Men
  • Writing

• I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.

  

  Jonathan Galassi
  • Poetry
  • Fire

• Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.

  

  Edwin Morgan
  • Work
  • Poetry
  • Explore

• Although I was able to study music with teachers, I never studied lyric writing. I read poetry, and I read other lyricists. But they were never writing in the style or the form that I was interested in.

  

  Paul Simon Simon & Garfunkel
  • Music
  • Study
  • Teachers

• Get rid of words, and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry.

  

  Yang Wanli
  • Words
  • Poetry

• Let a man be stimulated by poetry, established by the rules of propriety, and perfected by music.

  

  Confucius
  • Music
  • Poetry
  • Rules

• Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry.

  

  Georges Bataille
  • Poetry
  • Revealed
  • Eroticism

• I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay

  

  William Butler Yeats
  • Gay
  • Sick
  • Poet

• I also could see myself as a stand-up comedian, a fashion designer (for people of all sizes), a hairdresser, an earnest and eventually burnt-out politician, or the owner of a small bistro. But I fear that, without poetry, I would have simply been going through the motions.

  

  Denise Duhamel
  • Myself
  • Politician
  • Designer

• My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

  

  D. H. Lawrence
  • Wife
  • Literature
  • Habit

• Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.

  

  Isaac Newton
  • Kind
  • Poetry
  • Nonsense

• A lot of people think, 'I'll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn't work out I'll go get a law degree, do something else that's more practical.' For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.

  

  Brit Marling
  • People
  • Up
  • Work

• 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
  • Life
  • Nature
  • Enthusiasm

• We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

  

  Robin Williams
  • Love
  • Passion
  • Alive

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