Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - "le suggérer, voilà le rêve!").

For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

For this present, hard Is the fortune of the bard, Born out of time; All his accomplishment, From Nature's utmost treasure spent, Booteth not him.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

For, whom the Muses smile upon, And touch with soft persuasion, His words like a storm-wind can bring Terror and beauty on their wing; In his every syllable Lurketh nature veritable.

For a poet, style is the only morality.

For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

For what I have publish'd, I can only hope to be pardon'd; but for what I have burned, I deserve to be prais'd.

Functions of technical information, historic record, analytic argument, which are integral and obvious to Dante's use of verse are now almost completely a part of the 'prosaic'.

Fourier is a mathematical poem.

From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.

German poetry is going in a very different direction from French poetry.... Its language has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts "beauty." It tries to be truthful.

Give shape, artist! don't talk! Your poem be but a breath.

Gotta get a tight grip, don't slip, loose lips, sank ships, it's a trip, I love the way she licks her lips.

Grandfather / advised me: / Learn a trade / I learned / to sit at desk / and condense / No layoff / from this / condensery.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who ... shall ... persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.

Gently touching with the charm of poetry.

He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.

How wide is all this long pretense! There is in love a sweetness ready penned, Copy out only that, and save expense.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.

I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.

I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.

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.

He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

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 do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

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 am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

I blessed the power which has filled my life with poetry.

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.

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.

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 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 Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed 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.

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.

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.