Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Summer's lease hath all too short a date.

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 act of making poetry is an act of hope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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 one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.

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

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 poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself ... Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act.

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.

The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.

The poetry of speech.

The poet is he who fights on the passionate Side and whoever loses he wins; when he Is defeated it is hard to say who wins.

The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem.