Quotes About Poetry

How weightless words are when nothing will do. from "Gospel

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

The wasps had broke into your gallipots, And Eaten Up Your Apricots

I even, to my own amusement if no one else's, developed the knack of cursing in iambic pentameters.

Charles Wesley fully sided with the Arminianism of his brother John, and abused his poetic gift by writing poor doggerel against Calvinism.847 He had a bitter controversy on the subject with Toplady, who was a devout Calvinist. But their theological controversy is dead and buried, while their devotional hymns still live, and Calvinists and Methodists heartily join in singing Wesley's "Jesus, Lover of my Soul," and Toplady's "Rock of Ages, cleft for me.

So, then, the best of the historian is subject to the poet; for whatsoever action or faction, whatsoever counsel, policy, or war-stratagem the historian is bound to recite, that may the poet, if he list, with his imitation make his own, beautifying it both for further teaching and more delighting, as it pleaseth him; having all, from Dante's Heaven to his Hell, under the authority of his pen.

For grammar it [poetry] might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which, I think, was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man shoult be put to school to learn his mother-tongue.

Living by her side was like living in a fairy tale because she had these moments of pure poetry—she invented whole worlds. He tells me that eventually she was placed in a specialized institution, that in the end his father resigned himself to it: the death of his soul. She is still there.

All words are written in the same ink, 'flower' and 'power,' say, are much the same, and though I might write 'blood, blood, blood' all over the page, the paper would not be stained now would I bleed.

You don't go after poetry, you take what comes. Maybe the gods do it through me but I certainly do a hell of a lot of the work.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.

Autumn is the season of subtractions, the Japanese art of taking more and more away to charge the few things that remain. At least four times as many classical poems are set in autumn and spring, the seasons of transition, than in summer and winter. But what that means, I realize as the years pass, is that nothing can be taken for granted; people are on alert, wide awake, ready to seize each day as a blessing because the next one can't be counted on.

And the question at the heart of every one was as simple as it was unanswerable: how make peace and passion rhyme?

Tu sei come una pietra preziosa che viene violentemente frantumata in mille schegge per poter essere ricostruita di una materiale più duraturo di quello della vita, cioè il materiale della poesia.

I am black with love/ neither boy nor nightingale/ perfectly whole as a flower/ I desire without impulse

peut-être n'est-il pas excessif de voir dans le poème significativement intitulé « Héautontimoroumenos » [« celui qui se punit lui-même »]

Sweetheart, come see if the roseWhich at morning began to uncloseIts damask gown to the sunHas not lost, now the day is done,The folds of its damasked gownAnd its colors so like your own.

When you are old, at evening candlelit,Beside the fire bending to your wool,Read out my verse and murmur, "Ronsard writThis praise for me when I was beautiful."

Well we really meant you to visit Paris in May, but the rhythm required two syllables.

A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.

He was certainly in a confused state. I used to go and visit him in Callan Park. They were really - to me they were the best poets those two writing in those days but it wasn't very encouraging because, well, they weren't getting far were they?

The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.

The way a small child might dream of visiting Disneyland, I dreamed of writing books. Never did I think my poems would become that.