Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

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.

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.

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 of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

Let your poem be kept nine years.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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