Quotes About Poetry

In those days I used to talk to myself as if reciting poetry.

Our Age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? … The sun shines today also … There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

I'm never reading poetry again unless it's by James Whitcomb Riley!" And I went storming out of the house to try and shake off the injury done to me with words.

The song still remains which names the land over which it sings.

Es kann sein, daß wir dann eines Tages aus unserer Alltäglichkeit herausrücken und in die Macht der Dichtung einrücken müssen, daß wir nie mehr so in die Alltäglichkeit zurückkehren, wie wir sie verlassen haben.

Lieb Liebchen, leg 's Händchen aufs Herze mein; - Ach, hörst du, wie's pochet im Kämmerlein, Da hauset ein Zimmermann schlimm und arg, Der zimmert mir einen Totensarg. Es hämmert und klopfet bei Tag und bei Nacht; Es hat mich schon längst um den Schlaf gebracht. Ach! sputet Euch, Meister Zimmermann, Damit ich balde schlafen kann.

Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland. Der Eichenbaum Wuchs dort so hoch, die Veilchen nickten sanft. Es war ein Traum. Das küßte mich auf deutsch, und sprach auf deutsch (Man glaubt es kaum, Wie gut es klang) das Wort: Ich liebe dich! Es war ein Traum.

First poems! They must be written on casual scraps of faded paper, interspersed here and there with withered flowers, or a lock of blond hair, or a discolored piece of ribbon, and the trace of a tear must still be visible in several places ... But first poems that are printed, in livid black and white, on dreadfully smooth paper are poems that have lost the finest points of their sweet, virginal charm, and now arouse a ghastly feeling of distaste in the author.

I have often thought that poetry is a way to name loss, but it cannot accompany one on the journey of loss.

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.

Great poetry, whether written in Greek or in English, needs no other interpreter than a responsive heart.

Virgil is serene and lovely like a marble Apollo in the moonlight; Homer is a beautiful, animated youth in the full sunlight with the wind in his hair.

I really liked writing rhyming poems and plays.

When I was in fourth grade, I started writing a lot of poetry, and eventually, someone in the church was like, 'You should switch this over to rapping.' I went home and did that - started putting my poems over rap.

I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it's a writing style I guess I admire.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.

I still have a feeling that I haven't written the best that I can write. I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It's like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things.

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.