Quotes About Poetry

Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

I lock my door upon myself - a poet had said. I turn my key and there's -- happiness.

And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.

Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends. Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.

Ni siquiera la lluvia baila tan descalza.

This is why many people find performances of Shakespeare incomprehensible, because the actors are playing the poetry instead of letting the lines mean something and playing the situation.

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

The clown performs mute rites, as poetry always celebrates some willfully silenced voice.

He was seeking power and the use of power through knowledge of sin, of intoxication, of poetry

In reading poetry, we learn to read either in the light of timelessness or in the light of social justice or injustice as experienced by once generation.

Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.

harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge or taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftanOf tan with henna hackles, halt!

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

The plum survives its poems.

The book of moonlight is not written yet.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

The subject matter of poetry is not that "collection of solid, static objects extended in space" but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are.

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.