Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Thinking is always the stumbling stone to poetry.

This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

Though my verse but roam the air And murmur in the trees, You may discern a purpose there, As in music of the bees.

To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.

Though we do not have many poets, we certainly have more than we deserve, for we deserve none at all. It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.

To clothe the fiery thought In simple words succeeds, For still the craft of genius is To mask a king in weeds.

To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical.

To me the poets are closer than I am to the idea of voice, to a sort of primeval song that we all participate in.

To the birds and trees he talks: Caesar of his leafy Rome, There the poet is at home.

True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful.

Truth shines the brighter, clad in verse.

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

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.

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

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 always cut our poetical theories to suit our talent.

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.

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

we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

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.

Whatever is not stone is light

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

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.

We were together. I forget the rest.

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

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

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

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.

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 the rhythm and night ride, no heart can hide.

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 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.

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

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).

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

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

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!