Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

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

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

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 think the poet is the last person who is still speaking the truth when no one else dares to. I think the poet is the first person to begin the shaping and visioning of the new forms and the new consciousness when no one else has begun to sense it; I think these are two of the most essential human functions.

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.

It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has been foisted upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with separate 'particulars,' for such rows do not exist.

I thought of rhyme alone, For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble And make the daylight sweet once more.

It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

It is the unspecified 'you' of modern love poems that I am mostly concerned with here. At least, the addressee is commonly a lover, and the very fact that the name is withheld is offered as a guarantee of the closeness and significance of the relationship.

It is the role of the artistic coder to question the coding languages, both through self-reflection and by using them for unintended purposes. These coders introduce multiplicity where none existed and challenge definitions of intent for the entire environment of programming language, machine and system.

It is vain for the sober man to knock at poesy's door.

It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.

I've had the wind knocked out of me, but never the hurricane

I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.

It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful it is marvelously ineffable.

I want a poem which is made of compression, passion, precision, symmetry, & disruption.

I want a bedroom near the sky, an astrologer's cave Where I can fashion eclogues that are chaste and grave.

I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.

I want to be able to touch every part of our community with poetry.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man, so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object ofart.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Let first the onion flourish there, Rose among roots, the maiden-fair, Wine-scented and poetic soul Of the capacious salad bowl.

Knowledge and increase of enduring joy From the great Nature that exists in works Of mighty Poets.

Let your poem be kept nine years.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. . . . Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

Let's get my incantation right: "I wish I may, I wish I might" Give earth another satellite.

Kierkegaard was once asked, 'What is a poet?' He answered that a poet was an unhappy man whose moans and cries of anguish were transformed into ravishing music.

Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Melancholy is ... the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.

Men consort in camp and town But the poet dwells alone.

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.

Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.

Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.

Mr Witwould: "Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies." Mrs Millamant: "Only with those in verse.... I never pin up my hair with prose.

Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

My ear is not working, my poetry ear. I can't write a line that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard.

Madman drummers, bummers, Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat. In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat.

My publishers will make any kind of a beautiful book I design and send in to them, but ... For poetry they have less use than a rooster would have for skates.

My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn't yet fallen off completely.