Quotes About Poetry

The first English poet to use rhyme — in his Latin verse — was Aldhelm, in the eighth century, who, it will be noted, was a pupil of the Irish monk, Mael-dubh, whose school was on the site of the present English city of Malmesbury.

It is difficult for us to realise that in the ancient Irish Schools of Poets the students were trained in not less than three hundred and fifty different kinds of metre.

Life is an affair of mystery; shared with companions of music, dance, and poetry

I don't want to turn any of this into poetry / but / you're so beautiful / flowers turn their heads to smell you

One, two, three, four, turn your poles Give me a cup of sweet poitin Madness from the mountains crawling When I first saw you, my own Aisling

When one thousand people are engaged in agriculture and warfare, yet there is a single man among them engaged in Poems, Documents, argumentativeness and cleverness, then one thousand people all will become remiss in agriculture and warfare. … This is the teaching that impoverishes the state and weakens the army.

as long as there are movement and harmony, there are words.

15. "Master Filippus believes that three disciplines define us as humans," Miri said while they walked to the peat pits. "History, Philosophy, and Poetry. History is human memory, the examination of what came before us. Philosophy is human reason, or an attempt to make sense of what is. Poetry is human imagination, seeking to express what is, even while dreaming of what might be. History, Philosophy, and Poetry—that's what sets humans apart from animals.

NASA's next urgent mission should be to send good poets into space so they can describe what it's really like." --Dangerous by Shannon Hale

Poets seem to know things that scientists don't. And vice versa. Maybe they balance each other out somehow.

I don't want to because boys don't write poetry. Girls do.

Here's the thing: I'm ridiculously smart, and I'm pretty sure I have a photographic memory. It's like I have a camera in my head, and if I see or hear something, I click it, and it stays. I saw a special on PBS once on children who were geniuses. These kids could remember complicated strands of numbers and recall words and pictures in correct sequence and quote long passages of poetry. So can I.

if I want to know a poem, Biblically, respiratorily, cardio- vascularly, I chart the rhythms of its lines—and I no longer fear that beat interests me so deeply because I was a child beaten to the 4/4 beat

I want to gather the unaccented beats... and thank them, give them treats, whatever a feminine ending eats

And suddenly I see I do write poems in sentences—not broken into lines, but wound around the caesura, making a caduceus.

There are people whose learning is so great, they seem to inhabit a different realm of species-hood entirely. Somehow, they appear untroubled by the nullness. They are filled up with history and legends and beautiful poetry and all the gestures of all the great people down through time. When they talk, they are carried on a sea of their own belonging. It is like they were born to be fathers to us all.

JO watches her go, leaning against the doorpost. Then she looks round the room, smiling a little to herself -- she remembers GEOF.] JO: As I was going up Pippin Hill, Pippin Hill was dirty. And there I met a pretty miss, And she dropped me a curtsy. Little miss, pretty miss, Blessings light upon you. If I had half a crown a day, I'd gladly spend it on you. Curtain.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

I can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.

Religiously, we longed for the lively life in Christ, but we did not fully see that we were equally longing for the lively life of the mind - the delights of conversation at once serious and gay, which is, whatever its subject, Christ or poetry or history, the ultimately civilized thing.

The books of course had shaped his mind in a hundred ways, especially perhaps the poetry. He thought of the master at his school who had awakened him to the glory of Shakespeare, and his own discovery of Shelley. So many of the books, the best-loved ones, had been about England, and of course the poems were England itself. As a child England had seemed much nearer than New York or the cowboy west.

I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.

The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.