Quotes About Poetry

Poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul.

The intellectualist philosopher who wants to hold words to their precise meaning, and uses them as the countless little tools of clear thinking, is bound to be surprised by the poet's daring. And yet a syncretism of sensitivity keeps words from crystallizing into perfect solids. Unexpected adjectives collect about the focal meaning of the noun. A new environment allows the word to enter not only into one's thoughts, but also into one's daydreams. Language dreams.

Poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents of the intense life of language.

How much philosophers would learn, if they would consent to read the poets!

De um modo geral, os 'fatos' não explicam os 'valores'. Bas obras de imaginação poética, os valores têm tal signo de novidade que tudo o que deriva do passado é inerte com relação a eles. Toda memória precisa ser reimaginada. Temos na memória microfilmes que só podem ser lidos quando recebem a luz viva da imaginação.

A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language.

If we were to study these fragments by Baudelaire according to the normal methods of psychology, we might conclude that when the poet left behind him the settings of the world, to experience the single setting of immensity, he could only have knowledge of an abstraction come true. Intimate space elaborated in this way by a poet, would be merely the pendant of the outside space of geometricians, who seek infinite space with no other sign than infinity itself.

Pierre-Jean Jouve writes: poetry is a soul inaugurating form. The soul inaugurates. Here it is the supreme power. It is human dignity. Even if the form was already well-known, previously discovered, carved from commonplaces, before the interior poetic light was turned upon it, it was a mere object for the mind. But the soul comes and inaugurates the form, dwells in it, takes pleasure in it.

La poésie n'est pas une tradition, c'est un rêve primitif, c'est l'éveil des images premières.

The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche, the lesser psychological causes of which have not been sufficiently investigated. Nor

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

By God, quod he, for pleynly, at a word, Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!

Go litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye, Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, So sende myght to make in som comedye! But litel book, no makyng thow n'envie, But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.

He had more tow on his distaff Than Gerveis knew.

Now peradventure, in that mighty book Which men call heaven, it had come to pass, In stars, when first a living breath he took, That he for love should get his death, alas!

Her skin was not a surface; it was an indefinite glory of the palest rose and orange that chose to mould itself to those tense limbs.

The poets are wrong when they describe the grave as cold.

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them

That is what all the poets do: they talk to themselves outloud and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.

How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?

There are faces which charge with a meaning and pathos not belonging to the single human soul that flutters beneath them, but speaking the joys and sorrows of foregone generations -- eyes that tell of deep love which doubtless has been and is somewhere, but not paired with these eyes -- perhaps paired with pale eyes that can say nothing; just as a national language may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the lips that use it.