Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

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

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 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 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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.

Interfaces called transparent allow us to interact/do what we're supposed to do without being aware of how the effects are obtained. We should perhaps speak instead about their opacity, given that we cannot see through them to the machine.

In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.

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.

In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted.

In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it is the exact opposite.

In sober mornings do not thou rehearse The holy incantation of a verse

Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry.

In love, a verse of Mimnermus has more power than one of Homer.

In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

I testify to rainbow feathers, to the span of heaven and walls of colour, the colonnades of jasper.

I pulled a book by Robinson Jeffers off the shelf one day. It was powerfully moving. Tears ran down my face. That's when I became a poet.

I remember when you were born, it was dawn and the storm settled near my belly. And I rolled in the grass and spit out the gas, and I lit a match and the void went flash. And the sky split and the planets hit, balls of jade dropped and existence stopped.

I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don't pay attention 'cause it probably has floated into somebody else's head.

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.