Poetry Quotes
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I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.
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That’s physicists for you. Not exactly brimming over with poetry.
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I don’t write poetry when I wish, I write when I can’t, when my larynx is flooded and my throat is shut.
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Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
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I have my books and my poetry to protect me.
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Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
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Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.
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Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity... but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'...
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The poetry of fashion lies in the creation of illusion.
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Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.
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One merit of mathematics few will deny: it says more in fewer words than any other science. The formula, e^iπ = -1 expressed a world of thought, of truth, of poetry, and of the religious spirit "God eternally geometrizes."
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To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— True Poems flee—
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What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
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The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.
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My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.
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They see poetry in what I have done. No. I apply my methods, and that is all there is to it.
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I began to write poetry when I was about four years old. In other words, I've always been writing poetry.
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Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.
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Poetry makes people nervous. Especially in schools.
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In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.
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People go on quarrelling and fancying this and that, and thinking that the world is full of romance and poetry. When they get married they know better.
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... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
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I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.
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Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
