Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.

Sentimental poetry differs from naive poetry in that it relates the real state at which the latter stops to ideas and applies ideas to that reality.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date . . .

Silence is a sounding thing, To one who listens hungrily

Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.

Sometimes my poetry is an attempt to keep off existential terror; sometimes it is a grappling with philosophical problems; sometimes just fun.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

Some certified nut Will try to tell you it's poetry, (It's extraordinary, it makes a great deal of sense) But watch out or he'll start with some New notion or other.

Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side, And madness chooses out my voice again, Again.

Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power.

So we start with an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to reward this reader for this additional investment - text that we find exceptionally suggestive, apposite, or musical - are usually adjudged to be 'poetic'. ... The work of the poet is to contribute a text that will firstly invite such a reading; and secondly reward such a reading.

Stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position ... The stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation.

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

Still looking for that blue jean, baby queen, prettiest girl that I ever seen. See her shake on the movie screen, Jimmy Dean.

Summer's lease hath all too short a date.

Summary riposte To the dreary wail There's no knowing what Love is all about. Poets know a lot.

Test of the poet is knowledge of love, For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove; Never was poet, of late or of yore, Who was not tremulous with love-lore.

That which moveth the heart most is the best poetry; it comes nearest unto God, the source of all power.

That the mere matter of a poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter;Mthis is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

The act of making poetry is an act of hope.

The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".

The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue.

The author of haiku should be absent, and only the haiku present.

the attempt to control poetry, to subordinate it to extra-poetic ends, constitutes misuse.

The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent.

The essentials of poetry are rhythm, dance, and the human voice.

The future gets no say in who we are.

The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man; it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself.

The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.

The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.

The immediate success of the war poem anthologies ... proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse ... There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years.

The great charm of poetry consists in lively pictures of the sublime passions, magnanimity, courage, disdain of fortune; or thoseof the tender affections, love and friendship; which warm the heart, and diffuse over it similar sentiments and emotions.

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

The life and vigor of poetry consists of the fact that it steps out of itself, tears out a section of religion, then withdraws into itself to assimilate it. The same is true of philosophy.

Then one can't make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.

The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.

The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such.

The only gift is a portion of thyself . . . the poet brings his poem; the shepherd his lamb. . . .

The poetic function is the set towards the message itself, focus on the message for its own sake which by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

The poetry is the Earth, charming; The river, flowing from lofty mountains; Nature, a young woman and a heavenly plant with blossoming flowers, slinking in the garden of the mind.

The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision .. in Western poetry so much of the charged substance is previous poetry.

The poet's body even is not fed like other men's, but he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar and ambrosia of the gods, and lives adivine life. By the healthful and invigorating thrills of inspiration his life is preserved to a serene old age.