Quotes About Poetry

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poets is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language.

Poetry exists in a relationship so that it can speak to your interior life. That's why I believe that reading is relationship." —Edward Hirsch

I don't think that we should underestimate the capacity of tenderness that poetry opens within us.

There is always something about them that evades the understanding, and I have tried to remain aware that, as Paul Valéry has put it, "The power of verse is derived from an indefinable harmony between what it says and what it is. Indefinable is essential to the definition.

Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo," the seventeenth-century master of haiku, Matsuo Bash?, wrote in a series of insightful reflections on poetry. I would extend Bash?'s wisdom about nature, and about the poetry of nature in particular, to include the particular nature of poetry: learn about poetry from the poem .

The poet of Whit-manesque ambitions must find a way to present something that has as its sole purpose taking things away.

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.

Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, "leaving poetry free to go its way in tears.

The poet would befriend and comfort himself, if only he could.

If you had told me, though, when I was twenty-four that I would write about Skokie, Illinois, where I grew up, I would have said, 'You're out of your mind. Why would I have Skokie in a poem?' But you become resigned. Your job is to write about the life you actually have.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle.

Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.

When storm-clouds brood on the towering heightsOf the hills of the Chankly Bore.

His body is perfectly spherical,He weareth a runcible hat.

Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee! We think no Birds so happy as we! Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill! We think so then, and we thought so still!

nonsense pictures There was a Young Lady of Troy, Whom several large flies did annoy; Some she killed

The most successful scientist thinks like a poet—wide-ranging, sometimes fantastical—and works like a bookkeeper. It is the latter role that the world sees.

The early stages of a creative thought, the ones that count, do not arise from jigsaw puzzles of specialization. The most successful scientist thinks like a poet—wide-ranging, sometimes fantastical—and works like a bookkeeper. It is the latter role that the world sees.

I know they're not actually talking but the books on my desk seem to whisper "Drop what you're doing! Set aside your poetry! Open us, read us! Read slowly while you're at it. Always read us - every day - before you play.

awakening' drinkers to their optimum creative moments…to be intoxicated is to be inspired."10 It is not uncommon for ancient Chinese poets to have entire series of poems under the rubric, "Written While Drunk," including this one from the Zhang Yue (667 to 730): Once drunk, my delight knows no limits— Even better than before I'm drunk. My movements, my expressions, all turn into dance, And every word out of my mouth turns into a poem!11

Let me sometimes dance With you, Or climb Or stand perchance In ecstasy, Fixed and free In a rhyme, As poets do.

Verse is the natural speech of men, as singing is of birds' The Week's Survey, 18 June 1904

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.

Among the people, there will be someone as the poetry, as the imagination that displays neither present to the senses nor perceived as a real. When it comes true and visible, it becomes the Divine gift and reward for someone's visceral wishes, desires, and prayers.