Quotes About Poetry

I recognized the poem from Maulana Rumi and felt touched to the depths of my heart when I realized that Pari was committing both of us to God's care. "I will never abandon you. You are the star that I follow always." Pari's eyes misted. "Yes," she said softly, "you alone of all my servants have truly loved me." "With all my heart.

I want to ask you, as clearly as I can, to bear with patience all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were rooms yet to enter or books written in a foreign language. Don't dig for answers that can't be given you yet: you cannot live them now. For everything must be lived. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday, you will gradually, without noticing, live into the answer. Worpswede, July 16, 1903 Letters to a Young Poet

I always thought millennials are going westward, and they probably won't understand vernacular poetry.

I have these rhyme-based ideas because I love Julia Donaldson. 'The Snail and the Whale' is one of the most beautiful poems, and I feel like I could do that.

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

I carry Yeats with me wherever I go. He's my constant companion. I always can find some comfort in Yeats no matter what the situation is. Months and months and months go by and I know I need to switch to Shelley or somebody else, but right now Yeats is enough for me.

I like poems where you don't really know whether to laugh or cry when you read them.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry... thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.

No poet is required to write in stanzas, or indeed in regular forms at all. Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode' has a rhyme scheme and sequence of long and short lines that goes without regular pattern, following the mood and whim of the poet. Such a form is known as an irregular ode.

I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space.

If, at a party, I say I'm a poet, people have a hard time responding, almost as if I'd said I'm a priest.

I really like Pat Parker. I really like Audre Lorde. I read a lot of the Beats when I was younger, so Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder. I've been discovering a lot more modern poems as well.

That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.

Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.