Quotes About Meaning

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?

we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I Did, till we lov'd?

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

Poetry is something in-between the dream and its interpretation.

In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.

Poetry is a perfectly reasonable means of overcoming chaos.

Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.

I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

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

A poem should not mean but be.

Any work that is not rooted in myth and poetry or that does not partake of the depth and essence of the universe is merely a ghost.

Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.

Poetry's object is truth.

History is still in large measure poetry to me.

the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.

Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system.

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without