Quotes About Poetry

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry

The points are not the point; the point is poetry.

Prophecy is a poetry of change, social, political, moral, spiritual. It was with the prophetic model in mind that Shelley wrote of poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

I really would like to stop working forever—never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now—and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends.... Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.

No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm.

Poetry is a principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing.

Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.

Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

Cassia. I know which life is my real one now, no matter what happens. It's the one with you. For some reason, knowing that even one person knows my story makes things different. Maybe it's like the poem says. Maybe this is my way of not going gentle. I love you. (Ky Markham)

Qué irónico que la gente descarte las matemáticas como la antítesis de la creatividad. Están desperdiciando una forma de arte más antigua que cualquier libro, más profunda que cualquier poema, y más abstracta que cualquier otra cosa.

Como un poema que se recita pero jamás se escribe, es más poderoso porque únicamente se retiene en el recuerdo.

There was something about the smell of bookshops that was strangely comforting to her. She wondered if it was the scent of ink and paper or the perfume of binding, string, and glue. Maybe it was the scent of knowledge. Information. Thoughts and ideas. Poetry and love. All of it bound into one perfect, calm place.

Y cuando una niña es guapa, y cuando una niña es hermosa, el mayor poeta de Italia le dedica toda su obra, un inmenso lógico inglés pierde la razón por ella, un escritor ruso huye de su país para bautizar con su nombre una novela peligrosa, etc. Porque las niñas pueden llevar a la locura.

At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.

When you are learning through poetry how to speak English, it lends to a great understanding of sound, of pitch, of pronunciation, so I think of my speech impediment not as a weakness or a disability, but as one of my greatest strengths.

Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.

To be a poet, it's a challenge to do it in poverty, to do it in wealth. To do it in the academy, to do it in a relationship where you're happy. Everything changes the game. To do it in the awkward state of love, despair, dying. You just have to work it.

Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that so little of any value has been added since.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?

You will enjoy the TV and radio forecast much more if you stop taking it as advice and simply treat it as a short poem about the weather.

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.