Quotes About Poetry

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would rightly appal them if it did.

Soldiers in the war of poetry Bleed silky rose petals and glittering thorns And leave behind beautiful inked destruction— Embattled souls wounded, and healed.

Poetry should never hurt. It may stab you with poetic pangs of melancholy but shouldn't ever hurt as life does.

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

A poet rarely swashes ink but mostly mists at subtleties.

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, 'Yes, this is it. This is why the poem moves me so...' But you're back again where you began. You've back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.

Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. It is not necessarily a moralizer; it does not necessarily improve one's character; it does not even teach good manners. It is a beautiful work of nature, like an eagle or a high sunrise. You owe it no duty. If you like it, listen to it; if not, let it alone.

The condition of society is one of homogeneity and hyperindustrialism, so the individual perceptions of body and mind are not valued. Poetry is not the expression of the party line. It's that time at night, laying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Poetry is like an unexpected noise in the night: the creak of a door, the footstep on the porch, the soft scuffle of a moth against the screen, which rouses every sense to an instant alert. So comes poetry to the drowsy mind, which startles a moment, wonders, and returns to sleep.

Poetry staggers amongst stars, drunk on the night.

I yearn to fall asleep to the rose-scented burning-pink smoke and dreamy aromas of soul-poetry, so that I wake to a poem-tinted dawn and morning's sweet fragrance lays out my new day's path in flowers of purpose and joy.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Poetry and love can calculate past infinity.

I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

VERS LIBRE. A device for making poetry easier to write and harder to read.

Poetry was music. Poetry was not the thing said, but continual evocation of delicious suggestions of meaning. Poetry was an unconscious crystallization of glittering images upon the bare twig of metre. Poetry, at the nadir of this search for its essence, became the formless babble and vomit of the poet's subconscious mind.

Modern poets mix much water with their ink.

Modern poets are bells of lead. They should tinkle melodiously but usually they just klunk.

Thus, Whitman set out to express in his poetry the soul of his Culture awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil. Not only is the Faustian soul self-conscious; it is eternally restless, constantly striving upward, and possesses a sense of spiritual infinity. All these characteristics are given expression in Whitman's poetry.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.