Quotes About Poetry

Ferryman, for tea, scoop up those reflections of cherry blossoms.

Colecciono palabras: son golosinas en la boca del sonido.

I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

The arts which need interpretation are the arts of time -- music and poetry -- and not the arts of space -- sculpture and painting.

Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

Poetry transcends the nation-state. Poetry transcends government. It brings the traditional concept of power to its knees. I have always believed poetry to be an eternal conversation in which the ancient poets remain contemporary, a conversation inviting us into other languages and cultures even as poetry transcends language and culture, returning us again and again to primal rhythms and sounds.

I believe the poem is a sacramental act, pure devotion to whatever may be revealed only through the music of intuition. The dance of the intellect, the dance of wild imagination, illuminates what cannot otherwise be known.

I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

You should have been a poet. I was (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn't that obvious?

For Rhime the Rudder is of Verses, With which like Ships they steer their courses.

To a poet nothing can be useless.

To circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer, though a definition which shall exclude Pope will not easily be made.

Grubstreet—The name of a street near Moorsfield, London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.

Poetry does not consist of words alone there must be sentiment and fancy, combination and arrangement.

You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express—and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt anymore: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.

Shiftrunes?" "Letters that are pronounced one way on their first occurrence in a text, another on their second, another on their third, and so on in a fixed sequence. It gives the poet an interesting technique to exploit: she can have pairs of words that alliterate visually but not phonetically as well as pairs that alliterate phonetically but not visually. And she can play the two off against each other.

I say I think my poems now are finer than anything I've ever done; I only hope that is the judgement of a ruined mind, with critical faculties shocked and fragmented on grief; because if they are great ... they cost too much!

Small breasts rose beneath the laces of her vest, steady as breath.

Poetry is what is avoided as it is surrounded by translation.

She said something unprintable. When she finished there were tears starting on her lower lids. "What I want to say, what I want to express I just…"Again she shook her head. "I can't say it." "If you want to keep growing as a poet, you'll have to.