Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer made my mate.

Truth shines the brighter, clad in verse.

Unhappie Verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state, Make thy selfe fluttring wings of thy fast flying Thought

United States: the country where liberty is a statue.

Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer.

Verses devoid of substance, melodious trifles. [Lat., Versus inopes rerum, nugaeque canorae.]

We all scribble poetry.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

We always cut our poetical theories to suit our talent.

we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life-to rested language or language under surveillance-to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.

we are far too used to the assumption that poetry and poets will be there when we want them, no matter how long they have been ignored, taken for granted, misused. After all, isn't poetry a form of prophecy, and aren't prophets known for their talent for flourishing in inhospitable deserts and other bleak surroundings? Maybe. But maybe not indefinitely.

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

Went looking for faith on the forest floor, and it showed up everywhere. In the sun, and the water, and the falling leaves, the falling leaves of time.

We were together. I forget the rest.

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

Whatever is not stone is light

What matters Death, if Freedom be not dead? No flags are fair, if Freedom's flag be furled. Who fights for Freedom, goes with joyful tread To meet the fires of Hell against him hurled.

What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world.

Whenever I get lost in a novel I just throw a poem in. What it does is flare up, and it's so illuminated that I'm able to see where to go. I write between these illuminations.

when a poem says something that could not have been said in any other way, in music, prose, sculpture, movement or paint, then it is poetry.

When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.

When the rhythm and night ride, no heart can hide.

When something is too beautiful or too terrible or even too funny for words, then it is time for poetry.

When the tea is brought at five o'clock And all the neat curtains are drawn with care, The little black cat with bright green eyes Is suddenly purring there.

Why must ancients, and provided the same talent, be better than modern authors? Free to exploit the vast realm of the simpleand the natural, they did not have to be artificial in order to be original (which every artist aspires to be).

Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.

Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

Yea, marry, now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; before, it was neither rhyme nor reason.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

You can't make poetry out of thought; poetry is passion. Linear thought must be seduced by wild mind, by the fires of ecstasy.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble

...4-5-6: when time escapes the day in its most beautiful way. She starves for that beauty, she longs to quench her limitless thirst, but those moments are so fleeting and their limit is her unrest. Her bones are hollow and heavy as she takes a single step, and in that instant she is gone, blinded by the flash of a stray ray of light, her eyes close in that moment and stars flood her night. She falls forward slow, counting the half seconds of her descent. Her eyes stay closed, her thoughts are spent.

You never wish on shooting stars. You wish on the ones that have the courage to shine where they are.

You snipe so steady, you snub so snide, so rip and ready to diminish and deride.

2a.m and a ceiling stained with question marks.

5.57am and I’m finishing the last poem to the taste of the last cigarette. Smoke in my lungs, poetry on the paper. Inhale, exhale, it doesn’t get much easier.

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? . . . You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.