Quotes About Poetry

Why are you so sad? You read too much poetry. And you believe the wrong things about poetry. Poetry doesn't come from outer space. Poetry doesn't descend from heaven. Give life a chance. Life is stronger than the interpretation of life.

He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

Someone's summered in my stomach, Someone's fallen through my legs, To make an infant omelet, Simply scramble sperm and eggs.

Come voyeur my poems Feel free, I feel free.

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

Your friend's poetry is terrible," he said. Clary blinked, caught momentarily off guard. "What?" "I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random.

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven! If in your bright leaves we would read the fate Of men and empires,-'tis to be forgiven, That in our aspirations to be great, Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state, And claim a kindred with you; for ye are A beauty and a mystery, and create In us such love and reverence from afar, That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.

Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey; Because the first is crazed beyond all hope, The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy.

When people say, 'I've told you fifty times', They mean to scold, and very often do; When poets say, 'I've written fifty rhymes', They make you dread that they'll recite them too

Many are poets, but without the name; For what is Poesy but to create From overfeeling Good or Ill; and aim At an external life beyond our fate, And be the new Prometheus of new men, Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late, Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain

Now Juan could not understand a word, Being no Grecian; but he had an ear, And her voice was the warble of a bird, ... So soft, so sweet, so delicately clear, That finer, simpler music ne'er was heard; The sort of sound we echo with a tear, Without knowing why - an overpowering tone, Whence Melody descends as from a throne.

Hail, Muse! et cetera.

Ah me! what hand can pencil guide, or pen, To follow half on which the eye dilates Through views more dazzling unto mortal ken. Than those whereof such things the bard relates, Who to the awe-struck world unlocked Elysium's gates?

Science is not addressed to poets.

Aristotle, on the other hand, saw poetry as having a positive value: "It is a great thing, indeed, to make proper use of the poetic forms, . . . But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor" (Poetics 1459a); "ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh" (Rhetoric 1410b).

The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.

I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.

Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

Imagine a man in the ditch,The wheels of the overturned wreckStill spinning—I don't mean he despairs, I mean if he does notHe sees in the manner of poetry

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.

Ultimately the air Is bare sunlight where must be found The lyric valuable.

Boy's Room" A friend saw the rooms Of Keats and Shelley At the lake, and saw 'they were just Boys' rooms' and was moved By that. And indeed a poet's room Is a boy's room And I suppose that women know it. Perhaps the unbeautiful banker Is exciting to a woman, a man Not a boy gasping For breath over a girl's body