Quotes About Poetry

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.

After my marriage ended, I had an urge to skip that part of my life completely in terms of poetry, not publish anything at all about it.

Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper were my professors at Sarah Lawrence College - and they were uncompromised in their art. They gave me models of how to live one's life as a poet.

Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.

It takes something of a poet to apprehend and get into the depth, the lusciousness, the spiritual life of a great poem. And so we must be in some way like God in order that we may see God as He is.

Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

Constellations shine with light that was emitted aeons ago, and I wait for something to come to me, words that a poet might use to illuminate life's mysteries. But there is nothing.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

Long live the car crash hearts Cry on the couch all the poets come to life Fix me in 45

I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.

Coleridge cried; "O God, how glorious it is to live!" Renan asks, "O God, when will it be worth while to live?" In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker.

Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

There is nothing intrinsically more beautiful or poetical about the moon than about a dunghill; if anything, the contrary, for the latter is full of life and warmth and energy.

There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is the most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.

Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.

there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.

I would bring Patti [Smith ] in to the editing room [working on the Dream of Life] and say, "This is a great moment for a voiceover, or a poem," and then we'd bring in some sound design.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.

My life all-around is really different than a lot of other poets. Not poets that are parents, too, but just that I can hardly find anyone who works in the industries that I've worked in.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.

Life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.