Quotes About Poetry

That's what poetic speech is for--for the things that are true but don't make sense.

It's like a letter-writing society. They approach it like poetry. Not all of it is rebellious, some of it is quite beautiful. Just art, from kids who live in a world where they'll likely never see art. At least not officially.

If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.

The lively Shadow-World of Song.

Poetry is mother-tongue of the human race; as gardening is older than agriculture; painting than writing; song than declamation; parables,—than deductions; barter,—than trade.

Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the ploughed field; painting, than writing; song, than declamation; parables, than logical deduction; barter, than commerce. A deeper sleep was the repose of our most distant ancestors, and their movement was a frenzied dance. Seven days they would sit in the silence of thought or wonder; -- and would open their mouths -- to winged sentences.

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race; just as gardening is older than the cultivated field; painting than writing; song than declamation; parables than syllogisms; barter than trade

Die Gefahr[...] ist die poetische Ballfrisur der Liebe, und die hat sie auch höchst nöthig, denn in der Schlafhaub'n der Alltäglichkeit nimmt sich diese Himmelstochter miserabel aus.

Knowst thou the land where the lemon trees bloom,Where the gold orange glows in the deep thicket's gloom,Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows,And the groves are of laurel and myrtle and rose?

Who wants to understand the poemMust go to the land of poetry;Who wishes to understand the poetMust go to the poet's land.

Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.

Poetry is not simply a fashion of expression: it is the form of expression absolutely required by a certain class of ideas. Poetry, indeed, may be distinguished from Prose by the single circumstance, that it is the utterance of whatever in man cannot be perfectly uttered in any other than a rhythmical form: it is useless to say that the naked meaning is independent of the form: on the contrary, the form contributes essentially to the fullness of the meaning.

What I have lately said of painting is equally true with respect to poetry. It is only necessary for us to know what is really excellent, and venture to give it expression; and that is saying much in few words. To-day I have had a scene, which, if literally related, would, make the most beautiful idyl in the world. But why should I talk of poetry and scenes and idyls? Can we never take pleasure in nature without having recourse to art?

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article.

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

Poetry creates life; Science dissects death.

As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.

Superstition is part of the poetry of life.

poetry had everything to teach me about life.

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.