Quotes About Poetry

the last little orb winks behind our mountain Venus peeking one eye over her shoulder I boil water, you dice mushrooms for the sauce remember all the poems we wrote when we were young, I say always about that thin crack between day and night I write you another one right there in the kitchen for old times sake and butter melts on the table old witches know what that means out in the middle of nowhere

When I was done reading the poem, everyone was quiet. A very sad quiet. But the amazing thing was that it wasn't a bad sad at all. It was just something that made everyone look around at each other and know that they were there. Sam and Patrick looked at me. And I looked at them. And I think they knew. Not anything specific really. They just knew. And I think that's all you can ever ask from a friend.

When I was done reading the poem, everyone was quiet. A very sad quiet. But the amazing thing was that it wasn't a bad sad at all. It was just something that made everyone look around at each other and know that they were there.

he tried another poem and he called it Absolutely Nothing because that's what it was really all about

Donald Justice's admonition that a good poem should exhibit "that maximum amount of wildness that the form can bear" is also relevant, though again it's equally useful to think of expanding the notion of form to accommodate even more of the wild.

Arnold said, "Poetry should be a criticism of life

The good poem allows us to believe we have a soul. In the presence of a good poem we remember/discover the soul has an appetite, and that appetite is for emotional veracity and for the unsayable. The general condition of the soul, therefore, is stoic hunger, stoic loneliness. Paul Eluard wrote, "There is another world, and it is in this one." The not so good poem isn't able to startle us into consideration of that world. The soul is never pricked into wakefulness.

The good poem simultaneously reveals and conceals. It is in this sense that it is mysterious. The not so good poem is often mysterious only by virtue of its concealment. Or it wears exotic clothing to hide its essential plainness.

I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.

Can there really be a form of verse where all that counts is the number of syllables in a line? No patterning of stress at all? What is the point? Well, that is a fair and intelligent question and I congratulate myself for asking it.

You want poetry, first you have to muck in with humanity, you have to fight with paper and pencil for weeks and weeks until your heart bleeds: verses aren't channelled into your head by angels or muses or sprites of nature.

Thalia The finest, funniest, friendliest Muse of all, THALIA supervised the comic arts and idyllic poetry. Her name derives from the Greek verb for 'to flourish'.fn5 Like her tragic counterpart Melpomene she sports actors' boots and a mask (hers being the cheerful smiling one of course), but she is wreathed in ivy and carries a bugle and a trumpet.

If that kind of poetry doesn't make your bosom heave then I fear we shall never be friends.

In normal speech and prose our thoughts and feelings are diluted (by stock phrases and roundabout approximations); in poetry those thoughts and feelings can be, must be, concentrated.

People (even Americans) often find it difficult to talk about themselves.  Poetry gives them a kind of verbal costume in which they can express themselves with more dignity and confidence than the common dress of everyday speech will allow.

POLYHYMNIA was the Muse of hymns, of sacred music, dance, poetry, and rhetoric as well as—slightly randomly one might think—agriculture, pantomime, geometry, and meditation. I suppose today we would call her "the Muse of mindfulness.

The poet Hesiod says of Eurynome, in a fragment from the eighth century BC: "A marvelous scent rose from her silvern raiment as she moved, and beauty was wafted from her eyes." No one has ever said anything as wonderful as that about me.

The susurration of rushes and the hiss of sedges was swept on by the grasses and leaves of the trees and swiftly the soughing of cypresses and sallows sent the sound through the breeze.

The poor bloody poet can no longer say "ope" for "open," or "swain" for "youth," he is expected to construct new poems out of the plastic and Styrofoam garbage that litters the twentieth-century linguistic floor, to make fresh art from the used verbal condoms of social intercourse.

There was a young lady of Wight Who travelled much faster than light She departed one day In a relative way And arrived on the previous night.

Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.

Explanations are such cheap poetry.

When we grow up, concepts gradually get easier and we leave the images to the poets

A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures.