Quotes About Poetry

With contemporary poetry having approximately as many fans outside the immediate field as there are devotees of undergoing knee surgery, any sentient, breathing reader who's genuinely interested in poetry... not scared of it... seems a godsend.

Writing in a strict form can surprise you.

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

I'm partial to epic poetry, which might be surprising given that I don't write poetry at all. The combination of rollicking storytelling with musical language seems to me the highest achievement.

As anthropomorphic and surreal people have said my early writing was, to me it was really stock and almost banal in the sense that it was just description, the poetry of comparing: 'Your feet are like A, and your eyes like B.'

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty [...] I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again. (p. 262)

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem.

Versos libres El autobús lleno el corazón vacío el cuello largo el cordón trenzado los pies planos planos y aplanados el sitio vacío

Subido al autobús, por la mañana, Entre golpe, cabreo y apretón, Me encuentro con tu cuello y tu cordón, Lechugino chuleta y tarambana.

Like mathematics and music and cosmology and philosophy, poetry, too, can "infinitize" us, granting us what immortality there is to be had in this mortal life. And all those who vibrate in harmony to language that itself vibrates to the harmonies of the infinite are entitled to inclusion among the "small group of people.

Since physics is poetry, then poetry is physics, he propounded.

The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do

The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic.

Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.

B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.

Certain kinds of beauty make people weep, the moments "when hope and history rhyme

The curve of my spine was so elegant. I felt deeply moved that, in all the years of having these shoulders, this spine, this back, I had never noticed how it was a line of poetry—an overture to the magnificence of the human body. I realized in that moment that women have no clue about our own beauty; no clue about the connection between pleasure and time; no clue about this deep, delicious, endlessly replenishing source of divinity within each of us.

Mribus antqus rs stat Rmna virsque. (Ennius Ann. 467.)

Why should he think me cruel Or that he is betrayed? I'd have him love the thing that was Before the world was made. W. B. Yeats, A Woman Young and Old

if I can't write poetry, at least perhaps I can try to think and feel like a poet.

Heroic poetry tends in its simplest form to be concerned with immediate events and local heroes. A certain length of tradition is required before the epic poem, telling the story of the hero, becomes current. Heroic poetry assumes that the audience knew what the outcome of the battle was, and is concerned with individual feats; the context is of little importance. Epic poems only become attractive as a form when the audience needs to be told who the heroes were.

Heroic poetry tends in its simplest form to be concerned with immediate events and local heroes. A certain length of tradition is required before the epic poem, telling the story of the hero, becomes current. Heroic poetry assumes that the audience knew what the outcome of the battle was, and is concerned with individual feats; the context if of little importance. Epic poems only become attractive as a form when the audience needs to be told who the heroes were.