Quotes About Poetry

Poetry is the scholar's art.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.

Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

Bantams in Pine-Woods" Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt! Damned universal cock, as if the sun Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail. Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world. You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat! Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines, Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs, And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

Poetry Is a Destructive Force" That's what misery is, Nothing to have at heart. It is to have or nothing. It is a thing to have, A lion, an ox in his breast, To feel it breathing there. Corazon, stout dog, Young ox, bow-legged bear, He tastes its blood, not spit. He is like a man In the body of a violent beast. Its muscles are his own . . . The lion sleeps in the sun. Its nose is on its paws. It can kill a man.

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

He heard her low accord, Half prayer and half ditty, And He felt a subtle quiver, That was not heavenly love, Or pity. This is not writ In any book.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

Poets are never lonely even when they pretend to be.

The statement that the process does not involve the poet as subject, to the extent to which that is true, precludes direct egotism. On the other hand, without indirect egotism there can be no poetry. There can be no poetry without the personality of the poet, and that, quite simply, is why the definition of poetry has not been found and why, in short, there is none.

One poem proves another and the whole, For the clairvoyant men that need no proof: The lover, the believer and the poet

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven.

From the opening lines of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise All you need, To find poetry, Is to look for it with a lantern.

The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

Poetry is not about authority. Poetry is one of the few thing we all have access to all the time that transcends and transforms authority into freedom.

Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus' wanderings,Placard "Removed" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus.

Nor for you, for one alone,Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So 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.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you/ That you may be my poem/ I whisper with my lips close to your ear/ I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

I like space/openness in poems/poetry, and having the poems grouped into sections gives the reader a chance to breathe, to relax, to reflect, to meditate, to gather strength, excitement, anticipation to continue forward through the book.