Poetry Quotes
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I was seized with a strong desire to write poetry, so strong, in fact, that in imagination I thought I heard a voice crying in my ears – "Write! Write". I wondered what could be the matter with me, and I began to walk backwards and forwards in a great fit of excitement, saying to myself– "I know nothing about poetry."
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One of the most treasured books that I own is Donald Allen's 'The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.' It was a totem of great importance and potency to my group of writer friends in college from 1960 to 1964.
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I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.
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There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
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I thought of rhyme alone, For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble And make the daylight sweet once more.
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I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak.
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Once considered an art form that called for talent, or at least a craft that called for practice, a poem now needs only sincerity. Everyone, we're assured, is a poet. Writing poetry is good for us. It expresses our inmost feelings, which is wholesome. Reading other people's poems is pointless since those aren't our own inmost feelings.
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Poetry is a perfectly reasonable means of overcoming chaos.
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don't know why people shouldn't write poetry. That's brave.
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The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him.... He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.
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You have to understand a bit about the poetry of the blues to know where the references are coming from.
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I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.
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I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
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Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day, or Warren's blackin' or Rowland's oil, or some o' them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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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.
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It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
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I could feel it--inside, and I decided that night, reading poetry beneath a caged light bulb, that real was when you could fee your whole body light up from within.
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Poetry had everything to teach me about life.
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Poetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.
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Personality is everything in art and poetry.
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Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.
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In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.
