Poetry Quotes
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Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.
Ben Lerner
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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 a presentiment of the truth.
Anna Kamienska
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If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
John Barton
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I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.
Stephen Malkmus
Pavement
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There's poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don't like doing what people expect me to do.
Dave Grohl
Nirvana
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In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.
John Barton
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My all time favourite films - one is 'Mary Poppins,' and the other one is 'Pakeezah.' 'Pakeezah' was an Indian film. The beauty of 'Pakeezah' was that it had a soundtrack which was pure poetry.
Art Malik
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In the 1970s, for example, I found myself learning to relish the poetry of Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Wyatt, and getting a handle on poetry of plainer speech than I had dwelt with heretofore. Which led me into a new appreciation of middle William Butler Yeats, of the short three-beat line and forward-driving syntax, and that paid in, in turn, to a poem like Casualty in Field Work. The traffic, however, was usually the other way. My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.
Adam Kirsch
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In its use of words poetry is just the reverse of science. Very definite thoughts do occur, but not because the words are so chosen as logically to bar out all possibilities save one.
David Daiches
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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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As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary.
Eileen Myles
