Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

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 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 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.

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.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

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

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

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

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 your poem be kept nine years.

Men consort in camp and town But the poet dwells alone.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. . . . Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

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

Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

Madman drummers, bummers, Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat. In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat.

Melancholy is ... the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.

Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.

Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.

Mr Witwould: "Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies." Mrs Millamant: "Only with those in verse.... I never pin up my hair with prose.

Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.

My ear is not working, my poetry ear. I can't write a line that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard.

My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.

my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn't yet fallen off completely.

My publishers will make any kind of a beautiful book I design and send in to them, but ... For poetry they have less use than a rooster would have for skates.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.

My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.

Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.

Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets' being second-rate.

Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

Of all the trees that grow so fair Old England to adorn, Greater are none beneath the Sun Than Oak, and Ash and Thorn.

O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What's not for their applause, Being for a woman's sake.

Oh for a seat in some poetic nook, Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!

One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.

One had a lovely face, And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain. Because the mountain grass Cannot keep the form Where the mountain hare has lain.

One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.

One of the uses of poetry - one says it to oneself in distressing circumstances, ... or when one has to wait at railway stations, or when one cannot get to sleep at night.

One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.