Quotes About Poetry

Total absorption in poetry is one of the finest things in existence—It should not make you feel guilty. Everyone is absorbed in something.The sailor is absorbed in the sea. Poetry is the mediation of life.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

Japanese poetry does what poetry does everywhere: it intensifies and exalts experience.

Sottoportico San Zaccaria" It rains on the roofs As it rains in my poems Under the thunder We fit together like parts Of a magic puzzle Twelve winds beat the gulls from the sky And tear the curtains And lightning glisters On your sweating breasts Your face topples into dark And the wind sounds like an army Breaking through dry reeds We spread our aching bodies in the window And I can smell the odor of hay In the female smell of Venice

trying to translate into a language that's known a poem writ in the language of stone

Pound thought better than he practiced in this particular instance, for his Metro poem was supposedly a pure example of what he meant by Vorticism: "The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce call a vortex; from which and through which and into which ideas are constantly rushing. It is as true for the painting and the sculpture as it is for poetry.

haiku moment: that moment of absolute intensity when the poet's grasp of his intuition is complete, so that the image lives its own life. Such

we are justifying poetry by 'proving' that it is something else, just as, I believe, we have justified religion with the discovery that it is science."4

I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one's done it this way.

But metaphor, however poetic, never slaked a dry throat.

Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

For rhyme the rudder is of verses, With which like ships they steer their courses.

She that with poetry is won Is but a desk to write upon.

For run as fast as ever I may, My heart Moves only with you, Only with your blossoms, Remembering them Or awaiting them, Moving when you move in the wind And still when you are still.

We were dusty with our books. Come and let us go Out among the lyric brooks, Where the verses grow, Where the world is one delight Made of many a song Lasting till the nod of night, Lovely all day long.

The Earth is a jewel; he hangs 'mid the hair, He gleams 'mid the teeth of my Paradise there, Who tilts back a face that was born to beguile; And his nights are her tresses, his days are her smile.

Only I and the sunset In the snow-valley of your breast And the slow shadows of the motion of your breath, Only I and moonrise in the valley of your breast And the dark of sleep ... Until lilies in the valley have opened, And I am awake with petals And with the birds of your voice.

My young friend, why to poetry aspire? Don't court the muses, but adopt a trade, For literature is sadly underpaid.

Whatsoe'er thy birth, Thou wert a beautiful thought and softly bodied forth.

Her lips, whose kisses pout to leave their nest.

I am thinking, yes, about mute thunder. The honey of twilight.