Quotes About Experience

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment

Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving

If you want a definition of poetry, say: Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing and let it go at that.

She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.

In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision unapproachable by any other means.

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

Perfume is a story in odors, sometimes a poetry of memory

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

Poetry is language trying to become bodily experience.

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?

I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood?

Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.