Quotes About Poetry

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.

People need what they think of as a poem to be read at their bar mitzvah, their wedding, a funeral, whatever. And people are looking for hope and inspiration. I understand that.

The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom

The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.

To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.

They (the poets) are to us in a manner the fathers and authors of the wisdom.

Wisdom married to immortal verse.

For Poetry is the wisdom of the blood,That scarlet tree within, which has the powerTo make dull words bud forth and burst in flower.

Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles.

Swan, by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.

An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I cherish the fancy that Port speaks sentences of wisdom, Burgundy sings the inspired Ode.

I have long admired Ron Whitehead. He is crazy as nine loons, and his poetry is a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics

Architecture's original sin was that it could not tell stories in the manner of poetry and painting, although it has certainly tried, offering up such gestures of atonement as architecture parlante and postmodernism.

While architecture's sense of disciplinary inferiority ultimately derives from the antique pyramid of expression that placed language and poetry at its lofty apex and building down amid the mud and toil of the ground, architecture's Sisyphean effort to achieve elevation only became more futile with the development of modern capitalism on the one hand […] and avant-garde strategies of opposition on the other.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

To-day I wish that I were a tree, And not myself, Confronting spring with a neat little row of poems Like cups and saucers on a shelf. ... But as I am only a woman And not a tree, With piteous human care I have made this poem, And set it now on the shelf with the rest to be. - Wish in Spring

Jedes Gedicht, das dich berührt, ist wie ein Ruf, der eine Reaktion erfordert, und man möchte mit seiner eigenen Geschichte antworten.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and backTurn upward from the desk, when the human engine waitsLike a taxi throbbing waiting,I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.

Garlic and sapphires in the mudClot the bedded axle-tree.The trilling wire in the bloodSings below inveterate scarsAnd reconciles forgotten wars.

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestleWith words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.… The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.