Quotes About Language

Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely.

What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe

Poetry is perfect verbs hunting for elusive nouns.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.

Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted.

Poetry is the breath of beauty.

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

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement.

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.

It's not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word