Quotes About Poetry

I just can't get the poetry of the trees, he said.

I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.

I couldn't really mean what my poems said. Could any sane person really oppose hope, romance, love, marriage, children, family: the most basic materials of human society? Was I—the cool and composed sweetheart of the smart set, the Girl Poet made flesh—secretly a monster for entertaining such suspicions?

For me, a peaceful atmosphere devoid of noise and distractions is absolutely the worst place for poetry, likely to wind me up in a doomed attempt to stare down a blank page. My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight.

I didn't believe in love at first sight. In fact, as I would soon be reminded by seemingly every literate person in New York, I had written and published more than a few poems lampooning the very idea of it. But one need not believe in something for it to happen anyway.

The worst thing about Farrington's poem is that it presents the vast obscenity that was the Great War as a jolly adventure—but in fact any war story, no matter how unsparing or how true, warns against war only if its audience wants to be warned.

You see, nothing is more immediate, more complete than the sense of smell. In an instant, it has the power to transport you. Your olfactory sense connects not to the memory itself, but to the emotion you felt when that memory was made. To recreate a scent memory is one of the most challenging, eloquent pursuits possible. It's poetry, in its most immediate form.

Bend over, Freddy of Prussia Let the Empress take aim Your butt will fly to Russia Your brains to sunny Spain

The fates and character of the rhyming tribe often employ my thoughts when I am disposed to be melancholy. There is not, among all the martyrologies that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets.

The colonel nodded. Our childhood seems so far away now. All this - he gestured out of the vehicle - so much suffering. One of our Japanese poets, a court lady many years ago, wrote how sad this was. She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown. Well, Colonel, it's hardly a foreign land to me. In many ways, it's where I've continued to live all my life. It's only now I've started to make my journey from it.

when we were eleven, say, we really weren't interested in each other's poems at all. . . . But we didn't know a thing about poetry. We didn't care about it.

A poem needs understaning through the senses. The point of diving in a lake, is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake; to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.

Poetry is a way of coming to know the realness of things; fiction is a way of coming to know the world of relationships; nonfiction is a way of coming to know the world of the mind.

The Bungalow 4 counselor was a twenty-year-old college student named Eric who had terrible acne and wrote poems about the local girls who worked in the kitchen and how their breasts looked lonely but also beautiful, like melted ice cream.

All that's best of dark and bright.'

Christian faith is fact, but not bare fact; it is poetry, but not imagination. Like the arch which grows stronger precisely by dint of the weight you place upon it, so the story of the Gospels bears, with reassuring strength, the devotion of the centuries to Jesus as the Christ. What is music, asked Walt Whitman, but what awakens within you when you listen to the instrument? And Jesus is the music of the reality of God, and faith is what awakens when we hearken.ls

Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

Her lips are roses over-washed with dew, Or like the purple of Narcissus' flower; No frost their fair, no wind doth waste their power, But by her breath her beauties to renew.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them.

There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.

They say pu$$y and paper is poetry power and pistols.

As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy.

Chloe turned to Vetch. The poet said gently, "You see, you do have power. Words give you power, to create or destroy." His eyes flickered to Clare. "Even to forgive.