Quotes About Poetry

Sometimes she talked like a poet; she made a little joke of it, so that you wouldn't mind.

Jule was a poet—poetry was like psi, she said, like thought, a thing that compressed images to essence.

Is 'vagina' suitable for use in a sonnet? I don't suppose so. A famous poet told me, 'Vagina's ugly.' Meaning, of course, the sound of it. In poems. Meanwhile he inserts his penis frequently into his verse, calling it seriously, 'My Penis'. It is short, I know, and dignified. I mean of course the sound of it. In poems.

I have to find myself A place where I can breathe. That's where poetry lives In the oldest part of us.

In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.

I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.

No one knew better than he how an understanding of poetry depends on an understanding of the poet's universe.

Lewis said sadly to me, 'When I at last realized that I was not, after all, going to be a great man...' I think he meant 'a great poet.

Like Johnson, Lewis was more impressive in his conversation than in his poetry, and more impressive in his prose - particularly in his learned prose - than in his conversation.

always be one of her great joys that her father had said this to her and that she was able to delight him by paraphrasing one of his favorite poems: "We are not contained between our hats and boots." And then Mrs. DiPietro had come outside with their bags, and the father and daughter had walked home, their arms touching, molecules dancing between them, and the stars turning on like tiny lightbulbs in the evening sky.

When we are feeling at a loss in a poem, metaphor comes to the rescue. Metaphor is instructive, tactical, and interactive; it succeeds when its audience sees it as both strange and true. We need metaphor to make the error that allows us to reach beyond ourselves.

The evening sky is gold and vast. I'm soothed by April's cool caress. You're late. Too many years have passed, - I'm glad to see you, nonetheless. Come closer, sit here by my side, Be gentle with me, treat me kind: This old blue notebook – look inside – I wrote these poems as a child. Forgive me that I felt forsaken, That grief and angst was all I knew. Forgive me that I kept mistaking Too many other men for you.

And it's not because I'm tortured Or by some delirium swayed That I conjure up misfortune: It is just my trade.

And if I die, then who Will write my poems to you?

Once taken by her, you glowed And you drank her poisons, content. Because all the stars seemed to grow, And fields had a different scent, Autumn fields.

Beyond the lake the waning moon has slowed, And stands there like a window open wide Into a hushed and brightly lit abode Where something dreadful has occurred inside.

Half-closes her eyes — eyelids heavy with poems.

Whether to look for you on earth -- I don't know if you're dead or you live -- Or about you in the evening I should for you, departed, grieve. All is for you: and the daily prayer And the sleeplessness' swooning flame And the white flock of my poems And my eyes' blue violent flame. No one was dearer to me, no one, No one left me this bereft, Not even he who betrayed me to torment, Not even he who caressed, then left.

No sadness, my soul's no more of this world.

He was jealous, fearful and tender, He loved me like God's only light, And that she not sing of the past times He killed my bird colored white. He said, in the lighthouse at sundown: "Love me, laugh and write poetry!" And I buried the joyous songbird Behind a round well near a tree. I promised that I would not mourn her. But my heart turned to stone without choice, And it seems to me that everywhere And always I'll hear her sweet voice.

You haunt me still somehow, I've saved each word from you. — Anna Akhmatova, White Flock: Poetry of Anna Akhmatova . Translated by Andrey Kneller (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform July 30, 2013)

Blake has been admired by the surrealists because like them he made of poetry a way of life: his pictorial and poetic imagery was the overflow of a spiritual crisis and his art asserted man's creative capacities.

Art, even as poetry, was to become not an escape from the narrowness of lived reality, but the overflow of intensified life.

This moment is in the tradition of protest poetry and art that goes back centuries. I hope that this pain will lead to beautiful works of arts."-Anna Deavere Smith