Quotes About Poetry

Have ye beheld (with much delight) A red rose peeping through a white? Or else a cherry (double graced) Within a lily? Centre placed? Or ever marked the pretty beam A strawberry shows half drowned in cream? Or seen rich rubies blushing through A pure smooth pearl, and orient too? So like to this, nay all the rest, Is each neat niplet of her breast.

Joan Maragall

There's a better way. There has to be education, and the education has to come from the poets and musicians, because it has to touch the heart rather than the intellect, it has to get in there deeply.

One doesn't have to follow every proposition, make every connection-the intuitive or affective reading may be more practical anyway. What if one accepted the invitation-come as you are-and read with a different attitude, which might be more like the way one attends to poetry? Then difficulty would not prevent the flashes of understanding that we anticipate in the poets we love, difficult though they may be.

We must remember that there is a great difference between a myth and a miracle. A myth is the idealization of a fact. A miracle is the counterfeit of a fact. There is the same difference between a myth and a miracle that there is between fiction and falsehood -- between poetry and perjury. Miracles belong to the far past and the far future. The little line of sand, called the present, between the seas, belongs to common sense to the natural.

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. – Song of Solomon 2:1

In a way, women were asking for men to be poets and driving, passionate lovers at the same time.

Francesca was feeling good feelings, old feelings, poetry and music feelings.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry it is the exact opposite!

Attunement of one's feet to the bald and hairy earth. Consider the blackbird, perched on a reed, a north wind blowing, the water torn. Now is the poem's beginning, even at this late hour in the span of everywhere. Consider the lovers, with not enough arms for all their need to embrace. Or, if you prefer, consider the madness of wars, the impossible weight of oceans. And even if we had been there, would we have laughed or cried?

It's perfectly sane. Who wants transparency when you can have magic? Who wants prose when you can have poetry" pull away the veil, and what are you left with? An ordinary young woman of modest ability and little imagination. But wrap her up like this, anoint her with oil, and hey presto, what do you have? A goddess!

You seemed all brown and soft, just like a linnet, Your errant hair had shadowed sunbeams in it, And there shone all April In your eyes.

Bright is the ring of wordsWhen the right man rings them.

Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,must lay his heart out for my bed and board.

In it, he pushed the metric of typewriter spaces, and quoted from a poem, "The Catholic Bells," to show us Williams's "mature style at fifty"! This was a memorable phrase, and one that made maturity seem possible, but a long way off. I more or less memorized "The Catholic Bells," and spent months trying to console myself by detecting immaturities in whatever Williams had written before he was fifty.

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

distant hills powdered blue as a girl's eyelid

The great ages of prose are the ages in which men shave. The great ages of poetry are those in which they allow their beards to grow.

great poetry marches along the path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate egotism. The

I was, I remember, nineteen years old, wrote poems, still wore no proper collar, ran out in the rain and snow, always woke up early in the morning, read Lenau, considered an overcoat a superfluous item, received a monthly salary of one hundred twenty-five francs and didn't know what to do with all that money.

Wherever poesie can be felt, all poetic touches are superfluous.

Los versos que resuenan en su cerebro le parecen graznidos de cuervos; le gustaría arrancarse la memoria.

there come moments when we know we are no more and no less than waves and snowflakes, or than that which surely feels, now and then, from its so wonderfully charming confinement, the pull of longing: the leaf.

Close your eyes, and the entire history of England seems to dance in the light of this magic lantern: the thousands of villages, each with its own church spire and unique folk traditions; the poetry and drama; the pies and cakes; the green hills full of sheep; the factories; the Victorian ships and railways; the smoke and smog of urban life in the 1950s.