Poetry Quotes
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I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.
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Poetry interprets the chaos of human life and tries to bestow meaning on it. Without imagination there could be no poetry; and imagination chained by ideology produces only propaganda.
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My idea is simply - is very simple - is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater volume and be distributed in far greater volume, in far more substantial manner. You can sell in supermarkets very cheaply. In paperbacks. You can sell in drugstores.
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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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O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What's not for their applause, Being for a woman's sake.
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We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.
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The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.
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To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration.
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What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?
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What happens on the football field matters, not in the way that food matters but as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others: it engages the personality.
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Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
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We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'
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Poetry is the only hope.Even if you do not believe it, you have to do it.
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Take the sweet poetry of life away, and what remains behind?
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I believe that poetry should communicate.
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Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
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Most of us have been subjected to terrible political poetry at least once or twice in our lifetimes, and so we tend to shy away from it.
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Poetry was the maiden I loved, but politics was the harridan I married.
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Poetry makes people nervous. Especially in schools.
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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… 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. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented, but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.
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We need a safe place, a reserve of truth, a place where words kindle ideas and set ideas sparking off in others, a word sanctuary. Poetry is this gathering place of words.
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Coleridge received the Person from Porlock And ever after called him a curse, Then why did he hurry to let him in? He could have hid in the house.
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The poetry of fashion lies in the creation of illusion.
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He who without the Muse's madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poesy and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that the poetry which he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.
