Quotes About Poetry

For it is not true that one has the right to be loved by the person one loves, as the poets say.

There is dew on these poems in the morning, and at night a cool breeze may rise from them. In the winter they are blankets, in the summer a place to swim. I like talking to you like this. Have you moved a step closer? Soon we may be kissing.

Sich zu mögen heißt, zu entdecken, dass man dieselbe Sprache spricht. Sich zu lieben bedeutet, in derselben Sprache zu dichten.

The word qur'an means "recitation." It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was important in Arabia. The poet was the spokesman, social historian, and cultural authority of his tribe, and over the years the Arabs had learned how to listen to a recitation and had developed a highly sophisticated critical ear.

Just as there are only a given number of themes in love poetry, so too people have kept saying the same things about God over and over again. Indeed, we shall find a striking similarity in Jewish, Christian and Muslim ideas of the divine.

He claimed gleefully that he had no opinions at all, because he had no self. A poet, he believed, was 'the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity'.75 True poetry had no time for 'the egotistical sublime',76 which forced itself on the reader:

Roses are red, nuts are brown Skirts go up, pants goes down

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future.

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but, all unwept and unknown, are lost in the distant night, since they are without a divine poet (to chronicle their deeds).

Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets' being second-rate.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.

I think that I shall never scan A tree as lovely as a man. . . . . A tree depicts divinest plan, But God himself lives in a man.

Thus does the Muse herself move men divinely inspired, and through them thus inspired a Chain hangs together of others inspired divinely likewise.

The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.

They say my verse is sad: no wonder; Its narrow measure spans Tears of eternity, and sorrow, Not mine. but man's.

To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

As night to stars, woe lustre gives to man.

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

Poetry which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt - an image of the world in which men can again believe.

No bad man can be a good poet.

She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.

That which we know is but little; that which we have a presentiment of is immense; it is in this direction that the poet outruns the learned man.

Of all the things that men may heed 'Tis most of love they sing indeed.

Poetry is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious.