Quotes About Language

Poetry is language trying to become bodily experience.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite impressions.

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

Poetry is an extra hand. It can caress or tickle. It can clench and fight.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.

The specific excellence of verbal expression in poetry is to be clear without being low.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

If language had been the creation not of poetry but of logic, we should only have one.

I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.

Gently touching with the charm of poetry.

Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry.

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

Every evening words, not stars, light the sky. No rest in life like life itself.

Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

Poetry is fact given over to imagery.