Quotes About Poetry

It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.

he pugnaciously advanced his view that the study of 'high culture' has to be the main aim of education. Above all, he said, we must pay attention to ancient Greece, because it provided 'the models for modern achievement'. Bloom believed that the philosophers and poets of the classical world are those from whom we have most to learn, because the big issues they raised have not changed as the years have passed.

Poterunt discussis forte tenebris Ad puram priscumque iubar remeare nepotes Tunc Elicona noua reuitentem stripe iudebis Tunc lauros frondere sacras; tunc alta resurgent Ingenia atque animi dociles, quibus ardour honesti Pyeridum studii ueterem geminabit amorem.

You can't see why anyone wouldn't want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language .

Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for

Gücenmeyiniz, dedi, ?iirlerinize te?ekkür ederim. Sizin her geli?iniz benim için büyük teselli. Fakat hep birbirinize benziyorsunuz. Bir zevkli tecrübe, sonra elveda. Nevzat da öyle yapt?. Bir son vapur bahanesi kâfi.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

While he was at Oxford University his fascination for the Anglo-Saxon period intensified. It was a couplet from Cynewulf's poem 'Crist', which ran: 'Hail, Earendel, brightest of angels, over Middle Earth sent to men', that inspired his creation of the imaginary world that would form the setting for most of his writing.

It's always seemed odd to me that nonfiction is defined, not by what it is, but by what it is not. It is not fiction. But then again, it is also not poetry, or technical writing or libretto. It's like defining classical music as nonjazz.

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.

I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems

I would not dare Console you if I could. What can be said, Except that suffering is exact, but where Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?

Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.

Poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation.

A very crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself.

What one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is, the kind of environment one has had and has now. One doesn't really choose the poetry one writes, one writes the kind of poetry one has to write, or one can write.

My mother carried on and supported us her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.

Don't scorn your life just because it's not dramatic, or it's impoverished, or it looks dull, or it's workaday. Don't scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you've got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open." --Philip Levine, describing what he learned from William Carlos Williams, via NPR

Don't scorn your life just because it's not dramatic, or it's impoverished, or it looks dull, or it's workaday. Don't scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you've got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open.