Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

I believe in solitude broken like bread by 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 blessed the power which has filled my life with poetry.

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

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

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

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 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 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 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.

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 Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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 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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.