Quotes About Poetry

Most poets must be prohibited; the exercise of the fancy requires watching.

A lovely woman rolls up The delicate bamboo blind. She sits deep within, Twitching her moth eyebrows. Who may it be That grieves her heart? On her face one sees Only the wet traces of tears.

Man dies, his white bones are dumb without a word When the green pines feel the coming of spring. Looking back, I sigh; looking before, I sigh again. What is there to prize in the life's vaporous glory?

Lips like rosebuds peeping out of snow.

And then there is, of course, always, and inevitably, this spume of poetry that's just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth. Just masses of poetry. It's unstoppable, it's uncorkable. There's no way to make it end. If we could just--just stop. For one year. If everybody could stop publishing their poems. No more. Stop it. Just--everyone. Every poet. Just stop. But of course that's totally unfair to the poets who are just starting out.

Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.

With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.

I am not a man, but a cloud in trousers.

The oratorio, then, stands pre-eminent, at least in the infancy of orchestration, among all the modes in which music may be wedded to dramatic poetry. It, and it alone, gives the musician the utmost latitude in the choice of his subject, and in the employment of his resources. It is Handel's glory to have perceived its capabilities, and to have developed them in a manner undreamed of by his predecessors, and unsurpassed by even the greatest of his successors.

Fashions have changed; tastes have altered. In music, not less than in poetry and painting, each generation desires to have, and insists on having, that which best suits its moods--which most effectually appeals to the special quality of its emotions: and this universal principle of change ... makes it necessary that the artistic productions of every age, be they better or be they worse, shall at least be different from those of the preceding one.

All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

Do for God what you do for your ambitious projects, what you do in consecrating yourself to Art, what you have done when you loved a human creature or sought some secret of human science. Is not God the whole of science, the all of love, the source of poetry? Surely His riches are worthy of being coveted! His treasure is inexhaustible, His poem infinite, His love immutable, His science sure and darkened by no mysteries.

Love is the poetry of the senses. It has the destiny of all that which is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought. Either it is sublime, or it is not. When once it exists, it exists forever and goes on always increasing. This is the love which the ancients made the child of heaven and earth.

To call a desire into being, to nourish it, to develop it, to bring it to full growth, to excite it, to satisfy it, is a complete poem of itself.

It was so gorgeous it almost felt like sadness.

My feelings for you...are like the stillness of the sand...they make no sound...as they're washed away.

Sound is so important to creative writing. Think of the sounds you hear that you include and the similes you use to describe what things sound like . 'As she walked up the alley, her polyester workout pants sounded like windshield wipers swishing back and forth.' Cadence, onomatopoeia, the poetry of language are all so important. Learn all that you can about how to bring sound into your work.

Also, it was the morning and it seemed a little odd to be thinking about poetry before luncheon.

She knew exactly how she ought to feel, for she was well read in our greater and lesser English poets, but the unfortunate fact was that she did not really like being kissed at all.

People do seem to be ashamed of admitting that they read poetry,' said Jane, 'unless they have a degree in English—it is permissible then.

The aim of yoga is to eliminate the control that material nature exerts over the human spirit, to rediscover through introspective practice what the poet T.S. Eliot called "the still point of the turning world."

It's a showy habit I've got," I say. "To be always quoting poetry and stuff. Some of us use our brains, and some of us use our memories.

A terrible worm in an iron cocoon," as he was called in an anonymous poem, the knight rode on a saddle rising in a high ridge above the horse's backbone with his feet resting in very long stirrups so that he was virtually standing up and able to deliver tremendous swinging blows from side to side with any one of his armory of weapons.

There's a couple of reasons why I write poetry more than anything else. I have written a few, what could be called short stories, something longer than flash fiction, but after about 6 pages I found that I'm desperate to figure out how to get out of what I've created. Using that many words overwhelms me and I feel like I'm drowning.