Quotes About Language

The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

Poetry is the apotheosis of sentiment.

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

Poetry is music written for the human voice.

A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.

A poem should not mean but be.

Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.

What can be explained is not poetry.

A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.

I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.

Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit.

I feel the written word, poetry and literature is just one of the most beautiful things that human beings do. So we have to fight for it.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.