Quotes About Poetry

Like the stutterer who pronounces their words flawlessly through song, the immigrant writes their English beautifully through poetry.

It may baffle outsiders why poets would be so ingratiating, since there is no audience to ingratiate us to. That is because the poet's audience is the institution. We rely on the higher jurisdiction of academia, prize jury panels, and fellowships to gain social capital. A poet's precious avenue for mainstream success is through an award system dependent on the painstaking compromise of a jury panel, which can often guarantee that the anointed book will be free of aesthetic or political risk.

I wish you'd read your poems," she said sternly. "We need poems to heal." "I'm not ready to heal," I said as gently as I could because I was afraid how she'd respond. She nodded. "I respect that," she said, and walked away.

She talked about how the circuits of a poetic form are not charged on what you say, but what you hold back. The poem is a net that catches the stutters, the hesitations, rather

Myung Mi Kim was the first poet who said I didn't need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to "translate" my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience. No other mentor afterwards was as emphatic about this idea as her.

The nature of the Arabic language meant that a precise translation of the Koran was unobtainable. I found myself referring to two quite different English interpretations—George Sale's for a feel for the poetry of the work, and Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall's for a clearer sense of what the text actually said about sex and marriage, work and holy war.

World-mothering air, air wild,Wound with thee, in thee isled,Fold home, fast fold thy child.

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.

Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc únselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene.

De toekomst blijft, dunkt mij, aan de figuratieve kunst, zoals ook in de literatuur de toekomst zal blijven aan het samenhangende verhaal met een begin en een einde -liefst met een conventionele interpunctie- en aan het samenhangende gedicht, beide tot stand gebracht in beheerst en bekwaam taalgebruik, en beide hoe geheimzinnig van inhoud ook, aan de oppervlakte een duidelijk herkenbare mededeling bevattend.

of Shelley's masterpiece was not vague,

I am Rose my eyes are blueI am Rose and who are youI am Rose and when I singI am Rose like anything.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Pigeons on the grass alas.

Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?

He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present.

Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry.

Reason is the enemy of all greatness: reason is the enemy of nature: nature is great, reason is small. I mean that it will be more or less difficult for a man to be great the more he is governed by reason, that few can be great (and in art and poetry perhaps no one) unless they are governed by illusions.

but clearly the hypothesis, put forth in another note, of a future split into "two kinds of poetry and literature, one for the knowledgeable, the other for ordinary people" (Z 4388) seems now, two centuries later, to be prophetic.

So my mind sinks in this immensity: And foundering is sweet in such a sea".

So my mind sinks in this immensity: [15] and foundering is sweet in such a sea.

Dalla lettura di un pezzo di vera, contemporanea poesia, in versi o in prosa (ma più efficace impressione è quella de' versi), si può, e forse meglio (anche in questi sì prosaici tempi), dir quello che di un sorriso diceva lo Sterne: che essa aggiunge un filo alla tela brevissima della nostra vita.

Tutto si è perfezionato da Omero in poi, ma non la poesia.

preliterate authors, such as Homer, who cannot be grammatically constrained,