Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

Gotta get a tight grip, don't slip, loose lips, sank ships, it's a trip, I love the way she licks her lips.

Grandfather / advised me: / Learn a trade / I learned / to sit at desk / and condense / No layoff / from this / condensery.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize

How wide is all this long pretense! There is in love a sweetness ready penned, Copy out only that, and save expense.

He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who ... shall ... persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.

He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.

I believe in solitude broken like bread by poetry.

I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.

I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.

I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.

I blessed the power which has filled my life with poetry.

I believe that if I should die, and you were to walk near my grave, from the very depths of the earth I would hear your footsteps.

I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.

I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say ... something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand. Commenting to him about the poetry J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote.

I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.

I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.

I feel that the task of criticizing my poetry is best left to others (i.e. critics) and would much rather have it take place after I am dead. If at all.

I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative switftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.

If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.

If it doesn't work horizontally as prose... it probably won't work any better vertically pretending to be poetry.

If I could take your troubles I would toss them into the sea, But all these things I'm finding Are impossible for me. I cannot build a mountain Or catch a rainbow fair, But let me be what I know best, A friend that is always there.

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.

If you deconstruct Greece, you will in the end see an olive tree, a grapevine, and a boat remain. That is, with as much, you reconstruct her.

If you want to understand poetry, You have to go to its origin, If you want to understand the poet, You have to go to the Poet's home.

I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay

I had rather be a Kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same Meeter Ballad-mongers: I had rather heare a Brazen Candlestick turn'd, Or a dry Wheele grate on the Axle-tree, And that would set my teeth nothing an edge, Nothing so much, as mincing Poetrie.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

I have never injured anybody with a mordant poem; my verse contains charges against nobody. Ingenuous, I have shunned wit steeped in venom--not a letter of mine is dipped in poisonous jest.

I have to submit to much in order to pacify the touchy tribe of poets.

I invented the colors of the vowels!--A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green--I made rules for the form and movement of each consonant, and, and with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses.

I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection.

I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.

In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.

In autumn, when the leaves are brown, Take pen and ink, and write it down.

In communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves.

Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.

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.

[I]n every part of this eastern world, from Pekin to Damascus, the popular teachers of moral wisdom have immemorially been poets.