Quotes About Poetry

[Being in love] is something like poetry. Certainly, you can analyze it and expound its various senses and intentions, but there is always something left over, mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.

I had rather be hissed for a good verse than applauded for a bad one.

Malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man.

The true spirit of delight, the exultation, the sense of being more than Man which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

O lovely Sisters! is it true That they are all inspired by you, And write by inward magic charm'd, And high enthusiasm warm'd?

Fame is a bee It has a song - It has a sting - Ah, too, it has a wing.

Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose.

The poet's scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. The Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.

The goose gabbles amid the melodious swans.

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain.

Whatever else anyone says he was, he may have been. But Tupac really was a great American artist. The passage of time allows us to see things as they really are: We see the poetry; we see the personality; we see different sides.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

I remember, in fifth grade, doing a report on the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin as a rap. It was just an easy way to get an A back then because everyone was turning in boring stuff.

How much money you get, depends on lots of extraneous things. It depends on how good you are at turning poetry into a marketable product, which is something it was never supposed to be. That's why many people suppose that the better the poet you are the lower your income should be, and that's probably true.

The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.

Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.

Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.

During my twenties and thirties, my interest in the political poem increased as my apparent access to it declined. I sensed resistances around me. I was married; I lived in a suburb; I had small children.