Quotes About Poetry

But . . ." said Sissy. Sissy said "but" while sitting on her butt on a butte. The poetic possibilities of the English language are endless.

Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for making poetry is the same as the verb to breathe. Such tidbits of ethnic lore delighted Amanda, and she vowed from that time onward she would try to regulate each breath as if she were composing a poem.

POETRY IS NOTHING more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events until they shine with their singular nature, until we can experience their power, until we can follow their steps in the dance, until we can discern what parts they play in the Great Order of Love.

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about — clouds — daffodils — waterfalls — and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in — these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.

But the stillness was the sleep of swords.

I think about reading the poem to her, but some things are just too true to ever say out loud.

Poems build our capacity for imaginative thinking, create a tolerance for ambiguity, and foster an appreciation for the role of the unknown in human life.

So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that can be embedded in a particular human voice reporting from the field. One beautiful axis of voice is the one that runs between vulnerability and detachment, between 'It hurts to be alive' and 'I can see a million miles from here.' A good poetic voice can do both at once.

poems of experience bear the scars and wounds and scorch marks, even the imperfections that damage leaves on the soul, but a good poem also testifies to the triumph of still being able to speak.

When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.

Co-eye, kor-fie, alla same tree. . . . That's part of a poem, believe it or not. These are seeds of a tree, golden seeds for golden flowers.

In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium.

Poetry steps in at those moments when ordinary words fail: poetry as ceremony, as closure to what cannot be closed.

Often, in death, everything else fails. We are left only with the music and the meaning of poetry.

I have begun to believe in, and even to preach, a poetry of necessity. This is a recognition not just of the necessity of poetry to our lives, but also the fact that necessity is what drives most of the poetry that matters, or the way that it matters.

I think it is in grief that we need some reminder of our humanity--and sometimes, someone to say it for us. Poetry steps in at those moments when ordinary words fail: poetry as ceremony, as closure to what cannot be closed.

A non-programmer friend once remarked that code looks like poetry. I get that feeling from really good code, that everything in the text has a purpose and that it's there to help me understand the idea. Unfortunately, writing code doesn't have the same romantic image aswriting poetry.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Love and memory and thought and dream ~ My favorite poems have never been written in words.

This is the gift of humanity: that it is claimed by the self. None of us...are human unless and until we claim it for ourselves. But nothing can stop that claiming - not the eight million gods nor the spirits nor ghosts. Nothing but ourselves, anyway. And our lives become the poems we were born to tell.