Quotes About Poetry

A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.

Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

Few realise that English poetry is rather like the British constitution, surrounded by pompous precedents and reverences.

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

People who can't speak Russian will be less susceptible to Russian propaganda. But they will also be less susceptible to the poetry of Joseph Brodsky.

Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes.

Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.

The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.

Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.

I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.

The nerds are my favourite sort of boys - any guy with a passion - whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it's super sweet and it's very attractive for a female.

Rhythm and sounds are born with syllables.

A line has to have a certain number of syllables, and the next line has to be its mirror image.

The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: 'lane' rhymes with 'pain,' but it also rhymes with 'urbane' since the last syllable of 'urbane' is stressed. 'Lane' does not rhyme with 'methane.'

What makes a poem is the discipline inherent in making a poem: trying to fit feelings in the requisite number of syllables and lines, disciplining one's feelings.

Syllables govern the world.

In my opinion, it is easier to avoid iambic rhythms, when writing in syllabics, if you create a line or pattern of lines using odd numbers of syllables.

And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.

I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.

For this reason poets and artists developed the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake. The community did not appear to need them, so, tit for tat, they did not need the community. This being granted, it was no longer necessary or even desirable to make one's poetry either intelligible or sympathetic to the community.

When the Deep Purple falls, Over sleepy garden walls, And the stars begin to flicker in the sky, Thru the mist of a memory You wander back to me, Breathing my name with a sigh. In the still of the night, Once again I hold you tight, Tho' you're gone, your love lives on When moonlight beams. And as long as my heart will beat Lover, we'll always meet Here in my Deep Purple dreams.