Quotes About Poetry

I began a poem in lines of one syllable. It's rather difficult, but the merit of all things lies in their difficulty. The subject matter is gallant. I'll read you the first canto; it's four hundred verses long and takes one minute.

You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.

No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath... We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?" -Donald Miller,Through Painted Deserts

As it turns out, craft is to poetry what invention is to imagination--not antithetical, but needless. The eye does not invent the light; there's no need. The mind makes no materials; it doesn't have to. Imagination is the present state of things, and poems rejoice--in particular, in detail--that this is so. Again, the only work is trust, a trust rewarded by ease and by betterment.

The poetry of attention is not metaphysical. It trusts the opened eye to see. By faith, the eye stays open. And so the work of poetry is trust that, by faith, is shown to be no work at all.

In the poetry of attention, poems are not problems.

white and wise as the Sophoclean moon

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

The enemy is conventional language; the antidote is poetry and mild intoxicants.

Modern evangelicals like to compare holy things to soft drinks, designer clothes, [and other products in] our modern consumerist culture. The problem with this is not ... the comparison to a created thing. The problem is that it is ... bad poetry. The Bible compares God to very mundane things, but does so with poetic wonder. God "shall come down like rain upon the mown grass; as showers that water the earth.

...letting the desert scratch its own thorny poetry on the enormous moon.

A flock of geese leave their lake and take wing, turning to poems in the sky.

Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.

Two yellow orioles sing under emerald willows One line of White Egrets ascends clear skies Window frames Western riged snow of a thousand autumns Door moors Eastern Wu a boat of ten-thousand li

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art

The poet sees better than other mortals. I do not see things as they are, but according to my own subjective impression, and this makes life easier and simpler.

As I got older, I really got into Tupac's poetry, his books and just learning about his life and what he was into.

I dabbled in verse and it became my life

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

Books have always helped me make sense of things. With any life experience, you can find someone who has documented it in a poetic way.