Quotes About Poetry

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

Chi vuole respirare a grandi zaffate la musa del nostro tempo la precarietà può passare di qui senza affrettarsi è il colpo secco quello che fa orrore non già l'evanescenza il dolce afflato del nulla ...

La poesía cruza la tierra sola, / Apoya su voz en el dolor del mundo y nada pide / —ni siquiera palabras. / Llega de lejos y sin hora, nunca avisa; / Tiene la llave de la puerta. / Al entrar siempre se detiene a mirarnos. / Después abre su mano y nos entrega / Una flor, un guijarro, o algo secreto, / Pero tan intenso que el corazón palpita / Demasiado veloz. Y despertamos.

READING HOMER'S POEMS is one of the purest, most inexhaustible pleasures life has to offer—a secret somewhat too well kept in our time.

American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.

'Aurat' is an iconic poem which is relevant 70 years later and informs me in the work I do with women.

Lamantia is faith building, encouraging poetry in that it abstractly hugs you by finally capturing the inexpressible. It's an experience similar to relief, reading his poems.

Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.

What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so that, in principle, someone, somewhere, will be able to find it and read it. That is all I need, as a poet, and that is the beauty, the luxury of my position. My lyric is mine and remains mine. Nobody can ruin it.

I remember seeing 'Dead Poet's Society,' and it made it appealing in a way that I actually went to prep school.

I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.

I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.

I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

I rely on poetry or literature to keep me centered before I go onstage because it reminds me to be present.

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.

I didn't write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.

Poetry can't give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.

I don't want to, in any way, characterize a race or a people or get accused of racial profiling, but the Irish, as lyrical and romantic as they can be in their poetry, they can be every bit as repressed in their personal relations.

Only those ignorant of what poetry means will ask the question: what is it good for?

Songs like 'Everything To Help You Sleep' or 'Claws in Your Back' took a little bit more grappling with the actual poetry for me to feel comfortable with the song. And there's a little bit more song crafting going on, and I had a specific idea in mind of the imagery I wanted to evoke.

Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.