Quotes About Poetry

Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

Every time you write a poem it's apocalyptic. You're revealing who you really are to yourself.

My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time.

I read poetry to save time.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

My songs can make you cry, take you by surprise at the same time, can make you dry your eyes with the same rhyme

I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.

The fairest things have fleetest end, Their scent survives their close: But the rose's scent is bitterness To him that loved the rose. —Francis Thompson

Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.

I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love

A sonnet might look dinky, but it was somehow big enough to accommodate love, war, death, and O.J. Simpson. You could fit the whole world in there if you shoved hard enough.

We know fewer words, and the ones we know are less beautiful. The words we've lost tend to be connotative, and the ones we've gained tend to be denotative. I've never seen modem used in a poem.

was the day I knew the ingredients of the spiritual that would serve me—love, poetry, prayer, meditation

When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.

You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has ever been deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love. And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot.

All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now.

I didn't look to the shore much after this first long and memorable glimpse. I looked up at Heaven and her court of mythical creatures fixed forever in the all powerful and inscrutable stars. Ink black was the night beyond them, and they so like jewels that old poetry came back to me, the sound even of hymns sung only by men.

Laura remarked that science was dependent upon poetry, that all scientific description was metaphoric.

we are the sum of all we've seen and all we've appreciated and understood. You were the sum of sunshine on marble floors filled with pictures of divine beings who laughed and loved and drank the fruit of the vine as surely as you were the sum of the poets and historians and philosophers you'd read. You were the sum and the fount of what you'd cherished and chosen to abide and all you had loved.

After all, these were blood drinkers, beings who spoke gently, liked poetry, and yet killed mortals all the time.

Poetry is truth... It is the highest truth, and eloquence is its attribute.