Quotes About Poetry

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

There are two versions to every poem – the crying version and the straight version

Y aun no se me figura que me toca aqueste oficio solamente en vida, mas con la lengua muerta y fría en la boca pienso mover la voz a ti debida; libre mi alma de su estrecha roca, por el Estigio lago conducida, celebrando t'irá, y aquel sonido hará parar las aguas del olvido.

What else is a poem about? The rhythm and the images buried in the language. All the ways you can build an emotion with words, but you can't just write 'I feel sad.' I mean, you can, but it's not poetry... I think it has to be experienced instead of studied. You step into it.

In English, we were still on the Introduction to Poetry Unit, and I'm not lying, if I ever meet Percy Bysshe Shelley walking down the streets of Marysville, I'm going to punch him right in the face.

Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

There are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them... Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

How beautiful your sandaled feet, O prince's daughter! Your graceful legs are like jewels, the work of an artist's hands. Your navel is a rounded goblet that never lacks blended wine. Your waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies.

Repetition sometimes works in poetry, but rarely in prose. The musical provocateur John Cage once wrote a lecture in which a single page was repeated fourteen times, with the refrain "If anybody is sleep let him go to sleep" (Cage, 1961). Midway through, the artist Jean Reynal stood up and screamed, "John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute.

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Of course, talking only in proverbs would be impossible. Proverbs are full of poetry and twists. They are made up of words that have been molded for centuries, if not milleniums, until a minimum of words carry an extraordinary potential for meaning.

Quiet Prayer: As long as the sun shall rise goes the old lovers vow. But we are children of a scientific age & have no time for poetry. Still, I offer a quiet prayer of thanks for the sunlight each time I see your face.

poetry rose in Noah's heart: The pillars of heaven tremble and are astounded at his rebuke. By his power he stilled the sea; by his understanding he shattered Leviathan. By his wind the heavens were made fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent. Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand? And Noah knew that Elohim was his guardian who controlled even the sea dragon of chaos.

To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.

Beside the refined, almost Greek, simplicity of Chaucer's poetry, the ornamented verse of the contemporary north-western poet rears like A Hindu temple, exotic and densely fashioned.

This song is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

No outsider was allowed to glimpse the mansion when Elisabeth was in residence. She could go walking for hours, observing the deer (she always carried wooden rattles with her to protect her from wild boars, who were afraid of the noise) or composing poems.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.