Quotes About Poetry

By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.

Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

It is beautiful, all, in its going, This wonderful, sweet summer time; The leaflets glide down through the sunshine, As poets thoughts glide into rhyme. Sweet Summer looks over her shoulder, And whispers once more her farewells-- I wonder if Peace will come with her When her feet are again on the hills.

La amo. La mujer que yo veo cuando la miro es la mujer de mis versos, porque no la miro con los ojos de la cara, sino con los ojos del corazón

The leave are changing; I feel poetry in the air.

Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score; Then to that twenty, add a hundred more. Robert Herrick, 1648

The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

the words are only part of the poetic formula: the rest is ritual, and the reason in THEM must contend with the mechanics of magic-making in IT -- and must not win.

But there is a kind of poem you can call a Hawkins poem as there is a kind of chair you can call a Hawkins chair, and the object of both is to get praise, which is the confidence in yourself that you get from people whom you have succeeded in pleasing when you haven't any confidence in yourself.

Nothing is more practical than poetry," he says with a quizzical smile. "It teaches us how to be human.

Beware of becoming too sure of your beliefs, because you run the risk of dissociation, or losing touch with parts of yourself. That is why the irrational and spontaneous are so precious to the Sufi. The 'irrational' circumnavigates the rational mind and by that allows the unconscious to manifest. The spontaneous and flexible person, who is not afraid of non-rational impulses, unorthodox behaviors, poetry, and dreams, in other words, the totality of being, acquires a unitive nature.

Fakhruddin 'Iraqi produced one of the most exquisite commentaries on Ibn 'Arabi's doctrine of Love. This great poet-scholar had initially been associated with wondering qalandars, a group of outsiders who disregarded social norms and incurred the wrath of the orthodox community.

How can you tell if a Chinese poem is a good poem if you do not read the kind of Chinese in which it is written? Certain realms of experience charge an entrance fee. To evaluate certain experiences a person must have encountered that realm of experience in some fashion. He or she must have access to that realm.

poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?

A poem only becomes poetry when its structure is made not of words but forces.

La mayoría de los muertos callan. Ya no dicen nada. Literalmente ya lo han dicho todo. Pero no sucede así con los poetas. Los poetas siguen hablando