Quotes About Poetry

Very soon he will vanish completely in the wings of his own wordless stanza.

They were virtuosos of alliteration and didn't know it.

Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time.

The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)

And still the handwritten letters keep coming, the words keep coming, the words a woman wants to hear. No dashed-off faxes from Trader. Faxes, which fade in six months, like contemporary love. No scrawled reminders propped against the toaster, such as I get from Tobe. And used to get from Deniss, from Jon, from Shawn, from Duwain. GET SOME TOILET PAPER FOR CHRIST SAKE. That wouldn't do for Jennifer. She got a fucking poem every other day.

Where the bee sucks, there suck I. There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat's back I do fly."

Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. In ihrer Behausung wohnt der Mensch. Die Denkenden und Dichtenden sind die Wächter dieser Behausung. Ihr Wachen ist das Vollbringen der Offenbarkeit des Seins, insofern sie diese durch ihr Sagen zur Sprache bringen und in der Sprache aufbewahren.

All the poems of the poet who has entered into his poethood are poems of homecoming.

Only in thoughtful dialogue with what it says can this fragment of thinking be translated. However, thinking is poetizing, and indeed more than one kind of poetizing, more than poetry and song.

Es kann sein, daß wir eines Tages aus unserer Alltäglichkeit herausrücken und in die Macht der Dichtung einrücken müssen, daß wir nie mehr so in die Alltäglichkeit zurückkehren, wie wir sie verlassen haben.

Poetically dwells man upon this earth.

The task of the grounding of Da-sein by way of thinking and poetry overcomes the question of possibility. That question—How is such and such possible?—is the last implementation of mathematical thinking, which is the result of the dominance of the proposition as such, which in turn is the result of the collapse of ???????.

When we know everything about this earth, the romance and poetry will all have been wiped away from it. There is nothing so artistic as a haze.

There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.

La belleza me sorprendió como una especie de dolorosa melancolía.

The metre of the poet, the metronome of the musician, the centimetre of the mathematician, are all derived from the same root, metron: measure, measurement.

Life is never beautiful, but only the pictures of life are so in the transfiguring mirror of art or poetry; especially in youth, when we do not yet know it. Many a youth would receive great peace of mind if one could assist him to this knowledge.

Byron, in "Don Juan", face o satira amara la adresa femeilor care transforma dragostea intr-o "afacere de cap" uitind ca au "inima". Capul vine dupa inima, caci nu el este centrul corpului, ci o dezvoltare a lui. Cind moare un erou i se imbalsameaza inima, in timp ce filozofii si poetii au parte, dupa moarte, de cercetarea amanuntita a craniului si creierului.

You should deal sternly and despotically with your memory, so that it does not unlearn obedience; if, for example, you cannot call something to mind, a line of poetry or a word perhaps, you should not go and look it up in a book, but periodically plague your memory with it for weeks on end until your memory has done its duty. For the longer you have had to rack your brains for something the more firmly will it stay once you have got it.

This is in the highest degree the case with many of Goethe's and Byron's poems, which are obviously founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of phantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful.

But history is really related to poetry as portrait painting to historical painting: the former gives us that which is true in the individual, the latter that which is true in general;

Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin.

Her collarbones like wings spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin. — Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things . (Random House April 22, 1997)

In what language does rain fall over tormented cities? —PABLO NERUDA