Quotes About Poetry

For who so reaps renown above the rest, With heaps of hate, shall surely be oppressed. —Sir Walter Ralegh's poetry

Parece que en esto radicaría la supuesta magia que obra un buen poema: ideas, recuerdos y todos los detalles de un escenario presente y la acción que lo ocupa tienen igual rango y el mismo peso; infundido de una fuerza verbal animadora (pero vaga), el mundo irradia particularidad.

I had a boyfriend once who sent me--in a plastic bag, so it wouldn't drip--a real cow's heart with a real arrow stuck through it. As you may divine, he knew I was interested in poetry.

Here is a handful of shadow I have brought back to you: this decay, this hope, this mouth- ful of dirt, this poetry.

Once in a while, though, he went on binges. He would sneak into bookstores or libraries, lurk around the racks where the little magazines were kept; sometimes he'd buy one. Dead poets were his business, living ones his vice. Much of the stuff he read was crap and he knew it; still, it gave him an odd lift. Then there would be the occasional real poem, and he would catch his breath. Nothing else could drop him through space like that, then catch him; nothing else could peel him open.

Poetry deals with the core of human existence: life, death, renewal, change; as well as fairness and unfairness, injustice and sometimes justice. The world in all its variety.

The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary —the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch

This is "poetry," this song of the wind across teeth, this message from the flayed tongue to the flayed ear.

She is dying because she said. She is dying for the sake of the word. It is her body, silent and fingerless, writing this poem.

Is this really your fate, to enter poetry and become transparent?

Poems are made of words. They aren't boxes. They aren't houses. Nobody is in them, really.

My letters! All dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string.… —ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1850.

Poetry consoles me at the same time it inflames me, I said. 'You should know better,' he sniffed. 'It's poison for the soul!

Oh, why was he so handsomely blond, so courteously aloof, so maddeningly boring with his talk about Europe and books and music and poetry and things that interested her not at all - and yet so desirable?

El Sur producía hombres de Estado y soldados, plantadores y doctores, abogados y poetas, pero no ingenieros ni mecánicos. Estas profesiones vulgares eran buenas para los yanquis.

so courteously aloof, so maddeningly boring with his talk about Europe and books and music and poetry and things that interested her not at all

If you show a poetry professor your shiny new multiple choice teaching technology, he will invite you to exit his office.

All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.

The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.

Technology will never rescue anyone from being a bad poet, but if you're good, it has the potential to do a lot of exciting things.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.

I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate.