Quotes About Poetry

Just as we talk of poetic beauty, so we should also talk of mathematical beauty and medicinal beauty. But we do not talk like that for the very good reason that we know what the object of mathematics is, namely proof; and what the object of medicine is, namely cure; but we do not know what constitutes the attraction which is the object of poetry.

You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands

Jezebel the nun, who violently knits...

Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder, that the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze, leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder

bob dylan new orleans

Making it in poetry The young teller at the credit union asked why so many small checks from universities? Because I write poems I said. Why haven't I heard of you? Because I write poems I said.

Simmons hadn't been too surprised to find Franklin a young bearded man who looked more like he ought to be doing a poetry reading at a college than leading people to look at a classified government facility.

He wanted to know if the master sergeant had read Auden, the twentieth century's most influential Christian poet, English majors in the army, not many of them, not many of us, am I right, Top. Burnette, nonplussed, wondered if he should mention Eliot or the eccentric religious impulses of JD Salinger, but instead mumbled the only line he could recall from Auden's work, We must love one another or die. Bingo, said the colonel. Son of a bitch had the wrong conjunction.

It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it.

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

I've fixed my feelings into durable words when they could have been spent on tenderness

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.

As it fantasizes, poetry comes across nature. The real, living world is the only project of the imagination which has once succeeded and which still goes on being endlessly successful. Look at it continuing, moment after moment a success. It is still real, still deep, utterly absorbing. It is not something you are disappointed in next morning. It serves the poet as example, even more than a sitter or a model.

The wood echoed to the hoarse ringing of other saws; somewhere, very far away, a nightingale was trying out its voice, and at longer intervals a blackbird whistled as if blowing dust out of a flute. Even the engine steam rose into the sky warbling like milk boiling up on a nursery alchohol stove.

Poetry searches for music amidst the tumult of the dictionary.

Black spring! Pick up your pen, and weeping, Of February, in sobs and ink, Write poems, while the slush in thunder Is burning in the black of spring.

Through its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry seeks the melody of nature amid the noise of the dictionary, then, picking it out like picking out a tune, it gives itself up to improvisation on that theme.

One sublime malady/Is still called song.

hatching his poems..

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. --from Elm, written 19 April 1962

Now I am silent, hate Up to my neck, Thick, thick. I do not speak. --from Lesbos, written 18 October 1962