Quotes About Meaning

Poetry is a life-cherishing force.

Beauty is a cheap word, but beauty remains priceless.

No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.

Why poetry, you ask? Because of life, I answer.

When I say 'God' it is poetry and not theology

Poetry is telling something to someone.

Truth is poetry; it is the grandest poetry.

What is important-what lasts-in another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.

Poetry cannot be translation

Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

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

when a poem says something that could not have been said in any other way, in music, prose, sculpture, movement or paint, then it is poetry.

Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.

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