Quotes About Poetry

Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event.

The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.

Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.

Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.

Poetry is much more important than the truth, and, if you don't believe that, try using the two methods to get laid.

Yes, the mistrust of poetry has a long history, for a variety of reasons, but they all come down to sentiment and invention over fact and truth. Figurative language is suspicious.

My poems often start with an idea, some kind of inspiration. I don't expect anything. Every now and then something like "The One Truth" comes out.

After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.

Poets find truth by writing about what they love.

How much more doth beauty beauteous seem by that sweet ornament which truth doth give!

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

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I recall that one of the first investment bankers I met taught me a poem. God gave you eyes, plagiarize. A

Look down fair moon and bathe this scene, Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple, On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide, Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon. —Walt Whitman Sequel to Drum-Taps

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.