Quotes About Poetry

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—Lean on a garden urn—Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

More can be learned about how to write poetry from Dante than from any English poet…. The language of each great English poet is his own language; the language of Dante is the perfection of a common language.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion…

Zaraz zrobimy kaw?. Wprawdzie nie mam kawy, fili?anek i pieni?dzy, ale od czego jest nadrealizm, metafizyka, poetyka snów.

Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

Then there are the words that the Song of Solomon provides a man. The enchanting words of courtship." She closed her eyes and, lips parted, began to chant. " How beautiful you are, my love, your eyes are doves.... Your lips are like a crimson thread, and your mouth is lovely. Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate.... Your neck is like the tower of David.... Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies .

sad things are beautiful only from a distance

She (Emily Dickinson) loved simplicity, and perhaps withdrrew into seclusion because it was the simplest way of doing what she wanted to do; express her ideas and thoughts in poetry which no one whom she knew would understand. This was as natural to her as breathing, but the pretense of the people around her seemed unnatural.

Larkspur lifting turquoise spires Bluer than the sorcerer's fires.

Nå vet jeg at som leser må man ha tillit til forfatterne, til dikterne. De vet hvordan de skal gå frem for å rykke oss opp fra vårt vanlige liv og sende oss gyngende over i en annen verden vi ikke engang ante eksisterte. Det er det talentfulle forfattere gjør.

Dices que morirás de pena si no consigues a Livia. Los hombres no mueren de amor. Eso se dice en las poesías; pero la vida tiene poco de poética.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

Valentine's Day is the poet's holiday.

Pocket Poem" If this comes creased and creased again and soiled as if I'd opened it a thousand times to see if what I'd written here was right, it's all because I looked too long for you to put in your pocket. Midnight says the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped by nervous fingers. What I wanted this to say was that I want to be so close that when you find it, it is warm from me.

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd":

My attention span was quite short and I just wanted to use a lot of beautiful words. When I read a poem like 'Howl', or 'Lady Lazarus' by Sylvia Plath, I felt myself being moved - I wanted to do that for other people.

Living here in Cambridge, you had to have an identity. It was not enough to be a wife. So I did a Ph.D. in medieval Spanish poetry.