Quotes About Poetry

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

It takes more energy to find the words to describe poems than almost anything I can think of, except of course for trying to find the damn words to write one.

The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.

A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.

Walter Ralegh's "Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk" (p. 100):

To poetry belongs the golden, decisive word. Other arts have accepted nature herself as arbiter, from whom they have borrowed their forms. Music is the orphan whose father and mother no one can determine, and it may well be that precisely in this mystery lies the source of its beauty.

Earth fell," said the Surgeon, "because the Will required us to atone for the sin our ancestors committed when they treated your ancestors like beasts. The quality of our poetry had nothing to do with it.

His coat was red, and his breeches were blue,And there was a hole where his tail came through.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

In poetry a certain faith in the impossible,…as in religion a like faith in the inscrutable, must have a place[;]

Ferme tes yeux à demi, Croise tes bras sur ton sein, Et de ton cÅ"ur endormi Chasse à jamais tout dessein."   "Je chante la nature, Les étoiles du soir, les larmes du matin, Les couchers de soleil à l'horizon lointain, Le ciel qui parle au cÅ"ur d'existence future!

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.

Porque si la poesía te transporta al cielo, la novela policiaca te introduce en la vida tal como es, te ensucia las manos y tizna el rostro como el carbón al fogonero de los trenes del sur.

Ya no tengo ni encuentro palabras con las que pedir misericordia. Baldía y fea como una rodilla desnuda es mi alma. Busco un poema que no encuentro, el poema de un cuerpo a quien la desesperación pobló súbitamente en su carne, de mil bocas grandiosas, de dos mil labios gritadores. A mis oídos llegan voces distantes, resplandores pirotécnicos, pero yo estoy aquí solo, agarrado por mi tierra de miseria como con nueve pernos.

You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.

Hay momentos para recitar poesías y hay momentos para boxear.

Le daría el consejo que nos dábamos los jóvenes infrarrealistas en México. Cuando teníamos 20, 21 años, teníamos un grupo poético, y éramos jóvenes, mal educados y valientes. Nos decíamos: vivir mucho, leer mucho y follar mucho".

Ernesto San Epifanio dijo que existía literatura heterosexual, homosexual y bisexual. Las novelas, generalmente, eran heterosexuales, la poesía, en cambio, era absolutamente homosexual, los cuentos, deduzco, eran bisexuales, aunque esto no lo dijo.

This is my last communique from the planet of the monsters. Never again will I immerse myself in literature's bottomless cesspools. I will go back to writing my poems, such as they are, find a job to keep body and soul together, and make no attempt to be published.

Sólo la fiebre y la poesía provocan visiones. / Sólo el amor y la memoria. / No estos caminos ni estas llanuras. / No estos laberintos.

Hay momentos para recitar poesías y hay momentos para boxear».

Se puede conquistar a una muchacha con un poema, pero no se la puede retener con un poema. Vaya, ni siquiera con un movimiento poético.

Suddenly drawing courage from nowhere, he decided he was not going to die. Now or never, he thought, and began to swim back up. It seemed to take forever to reach the surface and then he could hardly manage to keep himself afloat, but he did. That afternoon he learnt to swim without arms, like an eel or a snake. In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.