Quotes About Poetry

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

Natalie S. Bober. A Restless Spirit: The Story of Robert Frost. Henry Holt: New York, 1998

David S. Reynolds. Walt Whitman. Oxford University Press: USA, 2005

He declared that it was his love for poetry—and his ambition to write great poetry—that had compelled his self-training. "To love poetry is to study it," he said to Ward. (Frost became one of America's greatest autodidacts.)

Stuart M. Sperry. Keats the Poet. Princeton University Press; Princeton, NJ, 1993

Gerald B. Kauvar. The Other Poetry of Keats. Associated University Press: Cranbury, New Jersey, 1969

Andrew Motion. Keats. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2001

Kay R. Jamison. Touched with Fire. Free Press: New York, 1996

One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

For the past thirty years or so, much American poetry has been marked by an earnestness that rejects the comic. This has nothing to do with seriousness. The comic can be very serious. The trouble with the earnest is that it seeks to be commended. It seeks to be praised for its intention more than for what it is saying.

Finally, what I want from poetry is akin to what Flaubert wanted from novels. He thought they should make us dream. I want a poem, through its precisions and accuracies, to make me remember what I know, or what I might have known if I hadn't been constrained by convention or habit.

Too many poets are insufficiently interested in story. Their poems could be improved if they gave in more to the strictures of fiction: the establishment of a clear dramatic situation, and a greater awareness that first-person narrators are also characters and must be treated as such by their authors. The true lyric poet, of course, is exempt from this. But many poets wrongly think they are lyric poets.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.

True poetry is born of scrutiny, Scrutiny, the son of meditation, Meditation, the son of lore, Lore, the son of inquiry, Inquiry, the son of investigation, Investigation, the son of knowledge, Knowledge, the son of understanding, Understanding, the son of wisdom, Wisdom, the son of Surrender to the Divine Will. The

If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

When you read and understand a poem, then you master chaos a little.

Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.

Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.

All language is an aspiration to music.