Quotes About Poetry

Augustine said he wept more for the death of Dido than he did for the death of his own saviour. What about Book Four, the best book of the best poem of the best poet?

Accident, agree, bagpipe, blunder, box, chant, desk, digestion, dishonest, examination, femininity, finally, funeral, horizon, increase, infect, obscure, observe, princess, scissors, superstitious, universe, village: those are just some of the everyday words that Chaucer introduced to the language through his poetry.

I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.

And all the beautiful words of the poets, Cornelius, can say nothing, I swear to you, of the fifty thousand ways to die like a dog, within a few hours.

Marriage, rightly concluded, is an incarnation of love--poetry expressed in action--a sweet embellishment of an otherwise prosaic existence.

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.

I can't bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn't even silly; it is the death of art.

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves...The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.

Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.

Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.

Gertrude Stein remarked that one writes for oneself and for strangers, which I translate as speaking both to myself (which is what great poetry teaches us how to do) and to those dissident readers around the world who in solitude instinctually reach out for quality in literature, disdaining the lemmings who devour J. K. Rowling and Stephen King as they race down the cliffs to intellectual suicide in the gray ocean of the Internet.

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.

only a few handfuls of students now enter Yale with an authentic passion for reading. You cannot teach someone to love great poetry if they come to you without such love. How can you teach solitude? Real reading is a lonely activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen.

Nossos atuais neo-historicistas, com sua curiosa mistura de Foucault e Marx, são apenas um episódio bem menor na interminável história do platonismo. Platão esperava, banindo o poeta, banir também o tirano. Banir Shakespeare, ou antes reduzi-lo a seus contextos, não vai livrar-nos de nossos tiranos.

Yet as readers, writers, and teachers, our authentic context is the myriad countrymen and -women who live in a daily reality that is mostly not at all our own. Socioeconomic reductions of their stance help only in a limited way. Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.

The elliptical mode in her poetry recalls late Shakespeare but is more extreme. A daemonic drive to negate precursors while maintaining their standards of excellence distinguishes her from some recent poetical ideologues of the feminist persuasion, whether in verse or prose. They claim Dickinson as ancestor, yet they do her wrong, she being so majestical, to offer her the show of violence.

The poetry was so ahead of its time no one has deciphered it yet

Poetry is language playing with itself.

If you're looking for fine art or literature, you might want to read some stuff written by the Greeks. Because to create true fine art, slaves are a necessity. That's how the ancient Greeks felt, with slaves working the fields, cooking their meals, rowing their ships, all the while their citizens, under the Mediterranean Sun, indulged in poetry writing and grappled with mathematics. That was their idea of fine art.