Quotes About Poetry

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes in forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...

Ah that such sweet things should be fleet,Such fleet things sweet!

If you were April's lady,And I were lord in May.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Words words words. Words Words words. Words words Words .

Taylor sighed. Going head-to-head with Sharpay on a school assignment was really beneath her. But the more Taylor considered it, the more she liked the idea of seeing her own poem in the paper. After all, the words "published poet" would look awfully good on those Ivy League college applications. "You know what?" Taylor said. "What?" Sharpay snapped. Hands on hips, Taylor stepped forward till the girls were nose-to-nose. "Bring it on.

In our era, it is because poetry is no longer practiced that some people can rediscover it in argot, in which the part of poetry remains small. Metaphors are to argot what the image of the Gypsy is to the Gypsy

oh each poet's a beautiful human girl who must die.

when someone reads poems I exist to be the one who's feeling it.

I'm alive and dead now, at the same time, speaking in your poems.

We could never sit at this kitchen table without our terrible and beautiful past and our poems that tell us who we are.

Writing a poem, I construct a magenta fan with a photolikeness, enclosed in a central oval, of a beloved relation, with her hair brown that is not to say, before her hair turned grey: it's her essential self. Someone's jealous of the attention I'm paying her in my work because he wants it all for his art which is a pure, gridded, layer of words painted in crosshatched grey monochrome brushstrokes. Your art, he seems to say to me, kisses life's ass. His art asks that his own ass be kissed.

I don't want this poem to be beautiful. I do.

or if I stand if I move one hand I hear the hiss of flowers closing their eyelids

the hour has not yet ended in which under a cloth of laurel I sat quite still.

Art is supposed to make you feel something, and I began to realize my appearance was my art. My body, my face, my scars told a story—my story. But I guess that's how life works sometimes—noticing beauty only in retrospect and poetry, in silence.

With women poets we look at or into, but not up at, sacred things; we unlearn submission.

To Wallace Stevens' post-Nietzschean formula 'God and the imagination are one,' these women poets would add a crucial third element: God and the imagination and my body are one.

Passing that fiery tree-if only she could; Be making love, Be making poetry, Be exploding, be speeding through the universe; Like a photon, like a shower; Of yellow blazes...

and my friend Karen remembers as a little girl studying Hebrew she inquired of her refugee tutor who stroked his beard and said in Yiddish "if there is a god or if there isn't a god a Jew studies"--isn't that a good story beloved, but the woman in me says that the poet lies the poet can afford to lie

We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.

O violet-haired, holy, honeysmiling Psapfo

Prose is sending poets to prison. Poetry is the poet in prison secretly composing poems by heart, going right on with the truth.

The sensual and spiritual are the same energy playing at different speeds, like poetry and dance.