Quotes About Poetry

Certain poems and lines of poetry seem as solid and miraculous to me as church altars or the coronation of queens must seem to people who revere quite different images.

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently. I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

Die Menschen bestanden in erster Linie aus Staub, und ich verstand nicht, warum es besser sein sollte, all diesen Staub zu verarzten, als Gedichte zu schreiben, an die sich die Leute erinnerten und die sie sich aufsagten, wenn sie unglücklich oder krank waren oder nicht schlafen konnten.

Tireless, tied, as a moon-bound sea Moves --from Hardcastle Crags, written 1957

What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. 'I don't really know,' I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to burn away all the peripherals

I can only end up with one, and I must leave many lonely by the wayside. So that is all for now. Perhaps someday someone will leave me by the wayside. And that will be poetic justice.

I have a lot to give someone, someday. But I must not be too Christian. I can only end up with one, and I must leave many lonely by the wayside. So that is all for now. Perhaps someday someone will leave me by the same idea. And that will be poetic justice..

The stony actors poise and pause for breath. I brought my love to bear, and then you died. It was the gangrene ate you to the bone My mother said; you died like any man. How shall I age into that state of mind? I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, My own blue razor rusting in my throat. O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at Your gate, father—your hound-bitch, daughter, friend. It was my love that did us both to death.

People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doc- toring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.

?udia sú totiž vytvorení zvä?ša z prachu a mne neÅ¡lo do hlavy, pre?o by lie?enie vÅ¡etkého toho prachu malo byÃ…Â¥ lepÅ¡ie ako písanie básní, ktoré si tí ?udia zapamätajú a v duchu si ich opakujú, ke? sú neÅ¡Å¥astní alebo chorí, alebo nemôžu spaÃ…Â¥.

Buddy said he figured there must be something in poetry if a girl like me spent all her days over it, so each time we met I read him some poetry and explained to him what I found in it.

I suppose if you can write sestinas which bam crash through lines and rules after having raped them to the purpose, then you can be satanic and smile like a cretin beelzebub.

The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it. 'Kindness' by Sylvia Plath

As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't. –

It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

Then, grubbing over supper, with the badly begun poem like an albatross round the neck of the day, nothing else.

Meanwhile, read Hopkins for solace.

What am I doing with a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood, Knee-deep in the cold swamped by flowers? — Sylvia Plath, from Leaving Early," Crossing the Water . (Harper Perennial May 9, 1980) Originally published 1971.

DEATH IS ONE OF THE MOST MOVING & TROUBLING EXPERIENCES OF LIFE: DEATH-IN-LIFE IS ONE OF THE MOST TERRIBLE STATES OF EXISTENCE: NEUTRALITY, BOREDOM become worse sins than murder, worse than illicit love affairs: BE RIGHT OR WRONG, don't be indifferent, don't be NOTHING . . . MANY POETS, MANY READERS live by poetry as people have lived by religion: BOTH ARE RITUALS, PATTERNS, [that give] special meaning to the most profound experiences of human life.

I give and give; my whole life will be a saying of poems and a loving of people and giving of my best fiber to them.

Then next week. Next week it all slows, rides easy under apple boughs.

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.

For me," she wrote, "poetry is an evasion from the real job of writing prose." Throughout