Quotes About Meaning

I am not interested in poetry for poetry's sake.

Every word was once a poem.

It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

Poetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.

Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.

Yea, marry, now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; before, it was neither rhyme nor reason.

Poetic effect is the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.

For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.

Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.

If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

It is not a waste to write beautiful prose or poetry for one person's eyes alone!

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

Poetry is talking on tiptoe.

Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.

Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason.

I know many lives worth living.