Quotes About Poetry

I like to borrow forms and quotes and use a lot of allusions, in both poetry and music.

I am no Poet here; my pen's the spout where the rain water of my eyes run out.

My grandmother would talk about having bananas at teatime and carrying palm fronds when the monsoon rains came, and I accepted all of those stories because they were like poetry.

Elaine Equi has been publishing her observant, often playful poetry for some 30 years, extending and deepening the range of her intrinsically wry voice.

I do believe that we've a responsibility to try to acknowledge the range, both geographic and graphic, of what's happening in poetry in English. I'm interested in poems that are first-rate. After that, I'm not too concerned if they come from Queens or Queensland.

I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me.

Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.

Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.

When I applied for grad school, I did not specify genre. I said I wanted an MFA in Creative Writing. I was so cute and stupid! The admissions committee at Pitt decided to put me in poetry.

I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talking to each other. I try to do both at once.

We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.

I want to be romantic, and songs are a good way to do that.

La poesía sirve sobre todo para complicar las cosas, ¿no? Pero igual complicándolas se entienden mejor. Y al entenderlas se simplifican.

Friedrich Hölderlin

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.

Dante, or the hyena that writes poetry in tombs.

That poem was not by me. It is among the things which quite overpower me; I have never been able to read it without tears coming to my eyes; it sounds like a voice for which I have been waiting and waiting since childhood. The poem is by my friend Lou... She is as shrewd as an eagle and brave as a lion, and yet still a very girlish child, who perhaps will not live long.

Four very strange and truly poetic human beings in this century have attained mastery in prose, for which this century was not made otherwise—for lack of poetry, as I have suggested. Not including Goethe, who may fairly be claimed by the century that produced him, I regard only Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walter Savage Landor, the author of Imaginary Conversations, as worthy of being called masters of prose.35 93

Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel --which may be described as an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable, in which poetry holds the same rank in relation to dialectical philosophy as this same philosophy held for many centuries in relation to theology: namely the rank of ancilla .

Celibacy is like poetry keeping the idea ever in mind like a dream; but marriage uses chisel and brush, concentrating more on marble and canvas. Celibacy jumps to a conclusion like an intuition; marriage, like reason, labors through ebb and flow, step by step.

The world is full of poetry; it is sin which turns it into prose.

Do not say we work to go to Heaven because we are mercenary. Does a man love a woman and ask for her hand because he is mercenary? I love poetry; there's no money in it.

Drualt cleared his throat and began the traditional stanzas from Drualt. They hadn't been said at weddings in his day, naturally, but they'd been said in Bamarre for centuries now. "Drualt took Freya's warm hand, Her strong hand, Her sword hand, And pressed it to his lips, Pressed it . . ." Drualt's voice wavered. He pulled a handkerchief from the pouch at his waist and blew his nose. Then he began again.