Poetry Quotes
In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.
Richard Serra
I used to write stories and poetry, but for some reason I have it in my head that if I'm going to write, I have to write a script.
Melanie Lynskey
As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.
Blaise Pascal
What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
Erica Jong
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth
But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
John Drinkwater
The truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion.
Walt Whitman
People who publish poetry today do it from a sense that poetry needs to be published, not because they think they are going to make money.
Campbell McGrath
My wife is a big fan of George Oppen and I got into him. I could have a career like his. It's not an alpha male situation, George Oppen. It's quiet. It's poetry.He just lived a life of an intellectual poet.
Stephen Malkmus
Pavement
Poetry stands or falls by its music.
John Burnside
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.'
Albert Camus
They snatched that from me which I still held. They vied with each other in reading poetry to me in sheltered corners. They hung on my words, and laughed appreciatively every time I opened my mouth—sometimes even before I had opened it, which is conduct that easily dries up the springs of conversation. Such young men do exist, and it is a pity, because they are so bad for the older women, who give heed to their flutings at their own peril. I daresay they would have been bad for me too if I had taken them seriously, but I wasn’t quite old enough to do that, and my sole reaction to their devotion was that I was irked.
Elizabeth von Arnim
What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?
David Eugene Smith
Teachers should be very careful not to spoil their pupils' taste for poetry for all time by making it a task and an imposition.
Ernest Shackleton
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.
Susan Hill
The more we know about this universe, the more mysterious it is. The old world that Job knew was marvelous enough, and his description of its wonders is among the noblest poetry of the race, but today the new science has opened to our eyes vistas of mystery that transcend in their inexplicable marvel anything the ancients ever dreamed.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
Poetry is most just to its divine origin, when it administers the comforts and breathes the thoughts of religion.
William Wordsworth
