Poetry Quotes
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Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.
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I saw the Village as a place you could escape to, to express yourself. When I first went there, I wrote and performed poetry. Then I drew portraits for a couple of years. It took a while before I thought about picking up a guitar.
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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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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.
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What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
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Poetry stands or falls by its music.
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Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.
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In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived.
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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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The essence of poetry is will and passion.
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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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I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.
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I am not interested in poetry for poetry's sake.
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He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who ... shall ... persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.
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Poetry must be as well written as prose.
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The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
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I myself have never called what I write anti-poetry. I also think that my poetry should not be only known as the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal but rather as Nicaraguan poetry.
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I love poetry, but I find it so difficult to write well.
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The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'
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Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
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My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.
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The sublime can only be found in the great subjects. Poetry, history and philosophy all have the same object, and a very great object—Man and Nature. Philosophy describes and depicts Nature. Poetry paints and embellishes it. It also paints men, it aggrandizes them, it exaggerates them, it creates heroes and gods. History only depicts man, and paints him such as he is.
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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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Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
