Quotes About Poetry

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

For me there is a poesis, a poetics, around the trope of the road that is embedded within many life experiences of the people I've been close to.

The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.

Lots of the time, we just think of the Bible as history or life lessons or poetry or - unfortunately - a collection of 'thou shall' and 'thou shalt nots!' All those elements are part of Scripture.

Poetry isn't an activity, it's a way life is lived.

My life's purpose is to write poetry - but behind the poetry must be the vision of a fresh revelation for men.

Take the sweet poetry of life away, and what remains behind?

Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.

When I was 18 years old I went to Shakespeare Company, the school, and I wrote a poem about my leaves - I felt like a tree that had no leaves. That is the life at 18.

Virginity is the poetry, not the reality, of life.

Out of the attempt to harmonize our actual life with our aspirations, our experience with our faith, we make poetry, - or, it may be, religion.

Maybe poetry's not so important, but ... it makes life worth living.

Life is beautiful because it doesn't last.

It's not surprising to me that books ended up playing a central role in my life, but it is somewhat mysterious that poetry did.

And when like her, O Saki, you shall passAmong the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass,And in your joyous errand reach the spotWhere I made One—turn down an empty Glass!

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and ThouBeside me singing in the Wilderness—Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane.

Mrs. Browning's death was rather a relief to me, I must say; no more Aurora Leighs, thank God!

Writing becomes a form of protest against the incontestable ravages of time. The poet takes revenge on mortality, defeating cruelty and saving what she can by thinking the unthinkable and presiding over her own creation. The joy of writing stands against the bitter knowledge of just how much of the world cannot be controlled outside the work of art. This is the art of poetry trying to kill time. "Probably

Every poem is shadowed by desire, but it is also shadowed by the problem of rendering desire in language. There is a place where similitude seems to break down because experience itself seems beyond compare.

Words floating in air, lines cut on a page, stanzas carved into units. Poetry is a mode of associative thinking that takes a different route to knowledge than philosophy, its ancient antagonist. It follows its own wayward but resolute path.