Quotes About Language

I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.

Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.

That's the main business of the poem!-to see if you can't make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.

For me, the measure of a poem is the word, not the line.

When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

Americans are not brought up with meter. They're not brought up with poetry. If you try to get them to recite, they're too embarrassed.

You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.

It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?

The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

Although it is true that petros and petra can mean 'stone' and 'rock' respectively in earlier Greek, the distinction is largely confined to poetry.

I myself always want to talk about "poetry," not "the poem."

I love indices! They are poetry in and of themselves, depending on the book.

When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

In poetry, rhythm is a priority above everything else.

Poetry is an art spoken, as if sung, in relation to other human beings.

Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.

Reality, the oppressor's tongue.