Quotes About Understanding

Before you ridicule, remember somebody on a railway platform who seems to be train spotting may actually be writing poetry.

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.

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.

I act as the tongue of you, ... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.

Then others for breath of words respect, Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect.

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.

Love is serious and tolerant. Magnificent and noble.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

Poetry is telling something to someone.

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

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.

The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

Lovers needn't always agree, anymore than poetry need always rhyme.