Quotes About Language

Sometimes only poetry can say it. I think there's just this deeper language, and away of putting your world back together again and breaking through barriers.

Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.

For me, poetry is a way of thinking, and like many poets, I'm driven by the idea of trying to find the impossible, perfect words: the words that will hold my subject.

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

A lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

Poetry must find ways of breaking distance.... all languages are dialects that are made to break new grounds.

Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

The cliche is dead poetry.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

Poetry, a speaking picture to teach and delight.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

Poetry is not a waiting room where one stays overnight...every word is war.