Quotes About Poetry

Now she stands out among Lydian women as after sunset the rose-fingered moon exceeds all stars.

a delicate young girl plucking flowers Just now Dawn in golden sandals But you yourself, Kalliope I myself once wove garlands.

Today dear friends I will sing beautifully and make you happy. — Sappho

I think of feminism as poetry; we hear histories in words; we reassemble histories by putting them into words.

I had loved poetry and the theatre. Now I loved adventure more.

The Unchanging Sun-swept beaches with a light wind blowing From the immense blue circle of the sea, And the soft thunder where long waves whiten— These were the same for Sappho as for me. Two thousand years—much has gone by forever, Change takes the gods and ships and speech of men— But here on the beaches that time passes over The heart aches now as then.

It will not change now After so many years; Life has not broken it With parting or tears; Death will not alter it, It will live on In all my songs for you When I am gone.

When April bends above me And finds me fast asleep, Dust need not keep the secret A live heart died to keep. When April tells the thrushes, The meadow-larks will know, And pipe the three words lightly To all the wind that blow. Above his roof the swallows, In notes like far-blown rain, Will tell the chirping sparrow Beside his window-pane. O sparrow, little sparrow, When I am fast asleep, Then tell my love the secret That I have died to keep.

asked the heaven of stars What I should give my love— It answered me with silence, Silence above. I asked the darkened sea Down where the fishers go— It answered me with silence, Silence below. Oh, I could give him weeping, Or I could give him song— But how can I give silence, My whole life long?

we must become bards: poets charged with the task of keeping and imparting the stories, language, values, and beliefs of a culture.

if we consider the various ways the imagination is engaged throughout scripture—through dreams, visions, metaphor, poetry, prophecy, parable (not to mention the very act of reading)—every page begins to light up with evidence of the imagination's role in divine-human doings.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rythymbound in poets' minds, defying time and age.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time, Tiering the same dull webs of discontent, Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.

When something is too beautiful or too terrible or even too funny for words, then it is time for poetry.

You know, Leonard Cohen is amazing, just a mastermind, and really one of the great geniuses of our time.

Time is, after all, the greatest of poets; and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame.

Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.

If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster

I saw [Allen Ginsberg] more as an old man who liked poetry and who had a lot of physical and emotional problems. We liked our time together.

I'm coming from journalism, but at the same time I'm tempted by poetry, politics, and maybe the idea of being a witness, a belief that you can still change things with the image.

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.

A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.