Quotes About Poetry

TIMMS: I don't see how we can understand it. Most of the stuff poetry's about hasn't happened to us yet. HECTOR: But it will, Timms. It will. And then you will have the antidote ready! Grief. Happiness. Even when you're dying. We're making your deathbeds here, boys. LOCKWOOD: Fucking Ada. HECTOR: Poetry is the trailer! Forthcoming attractions!

The poetry, you see, was when he moved. -- Dream Done Green

It is easier to think in a foreign language than to feel in it. Therefore no art is more stubbornly national than poetry.

Because I had gone through the same thing. I had tasted the darkness." "You'd 'tasted the darkness', had you?" "I'm allowed to have some poetry in my life, Valkyrie." "'Tasted the darkness, I swear to God... What, did you have a darkness sandwich, or was it a whole plate? What did you have for dessert? Was it pretentiousness? Did you have a bowl of pretentiousness for dessert?

I lived there as a boy and know the coalGlittering in its shed, late-afternoonLambency informing the deal table,The ceiling cradled in a radiant spoon.I must be lying low in a room there,A strange child with a taste for verse,While my hard-nosed companions dream of fireAnd sword upon parched veldt and fields of rain-swept gorse.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

The tourist archipelagoes of my Southare prisons too, corruptible, and thoughthere is no harder prison than writing verse,what's poetry, if it is worth its salt,but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

I loved them as poets love the poetry that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main.

Para atender mejor el oficio del verso/arrodíllate

because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.

When you make a tomb, make another tomb next to mine.' When asked why, he said, 'When my poet friend hears of my departure, he will come to me and want to die and be buried beside me.' 'But you have never met him. How do you know he will come?' 'I know him. And he knows me. He will come.' And the poet did come. And the two friends were buried next to each other.

Those who are comfortable with imagination appreciate metaphors and symbols. Those who are not prefer the literal. Only through metaphors and symbols can one convey the conceptual. Without poetry, you cannot communicate ideas that are not material and measurable, like love, or justice or remarkability. But

In classical Sanskrit poetry, the laughter of women is responsible for the blooming of plants, which is why women were invited to the royal gardens in spring to sing and dance and play.

Poets speak truth when no one else can or will. That's why the hunger for poetry grows when the world grows dark. When repression grows, when people speak in whispers or not at all, they turn to poetry to find out what's going on.

Poetry uses the hub of a torque converter for a jello mold.

Why should a poem please even a majority of readers or listeners? Perhaps someone needs the particular poem that you wrote. You probably do, at any rate.

The poem is smarter than the poet and more rebellious. A strong poem will override its author's initial intentions.

the process of revising a poem is no arbitrary tinkering, but a continued honing of the self at the deepest level. —Jane Hirshfield

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.