Quotes About Poetry

When one writes the last apple on the tree, or the one small peach as pink as dawn, one is beginning to deal with particulars - to develop texture... Such texture is vital to all poetry. It is what makes the poem an experience, something much more than mere statement.

Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her— her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.

The words, in the long lines of Leaves of Grass, as near as words can be, are a spiritual and a physical touching.

I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company.

A poem that is composed without the sweet and correct formalities of language, which are what sets it apart from the dailiness of ordinary writing, is doomed. It will not fly. It will be raucous and sloppy—the work of an amateur.

Me encantaba investigar lo que ocurría en el mundo... ella prefería ocuparse en perseguir las etéreas creaciones de los poetas. El mundo era para mí un secreto que deseaba desvelar... para ella era un espacio que deseaba poblar con sus propias imaginaciones.

Their melancholy is soothing, and their joy elevating, to a degree I never experienced in studying the authors of any other country. When you read ther writings, life appears to consist in a warm sun and a garden of roses, in the smiles and frowns of a fair enemy, and the fire that consumes your own heart. How different from the manly and heroical poetry of Greece and Rome!

Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.

The best words in the best order...one always go the same shock of recognition and delight when someone's words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture. Poetry was awful good material to think with.

The force of Dante's poetry resonated most in those who did not confess the Catholic faith, for believers would inevitably have quibbles with Dante's theology. But for those most distant theologically, Dante's faith was so perfect, so unyielding, that a reader found himself compelled by the poetry to take it all to heart.

People admired her poetry, but she knew there were plenty of readers who questioned it. How could she write brokenhearted verse if she never loved? Why did she compose so much about death if she knew little of life?

Dante had done what so many writers could only imagine—turned poetry into a living power, and a living power was something no one could cage inside the covers of a book.

The recurring lovesickness of my teenage years often brought debilitating side effects, the worst of these being a compulsion to write Christian poetry. 

It looks like something out of Whittier's Snowbound,' Julia said. Julia could always think of things like that to say.

A boy and a girl, I forget their names. The two of them seemed to be a pair. The girl had hair like a raven and the boy looked a bit like Byron. They were interested in poetry. They had a little light behind the eyes. The girl asked me about Dorothy Parker

The most beautiful words were those which were not needed.

I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events. (p289)

our true home, our true history, was in our poetry.

I opened it the way we used to open Hafez, closing our eyes, asking our question and letting our finger rest somewhere at random. It opened to the page in the middle of Burt Norton,' beginning with the lines At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor/fleshless./ Neither from not toward; at the still point,there the dance/is.

What choice does the king have but to kick the poets and storytellers out of his republic? And what choice does the poet have but to destabilize the philosopher king's power by speaking the truth?

Human beings are members of a whole In creation of one essence and soul. Ben informed me that those lines were written by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa'adi, one of the most beloved figures in Iranian culture. We found this ironic, given how much of my time at UNGA was devoted to trying to curb Iran's development of nuclear weapons. Apparently, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad didn't share the poet's gentle sensibilities.

There was poetry as well – a luminous world always present beneath the surface, a world that people might offer up as a gift to me, if I only remembered to ask

I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another.

No one seemed to realize calculating sums requires only the most basic machinery and good concentration. Poetry is far more difficult. And palindromes, with their perfect, satisfying taste: Draw a level award! Yet it is always the thin gray grocery sums that make an impression.