Quotes About Poetry

Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or mollusc, and isolated it, — which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusc or man or angel only exists in system, in relation... Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Specks of universe in my soul, flurries of God in my head. Heart ticks away, doing its job— whispering poetry all the while. Enlightenment flickers subtly from old gray half-burnt wicks.

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?

One of the things we do as poets, is to try to preserve experiences, people, places important to us, in an effort to save them from time's erasure.

I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking, a great human gift disowned.

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void.

crimson and clover

Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its purpose and value, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives.

when poets go back by way of memory and imagination to past traumas to engage or re-engage them, then those poets are taking control—are shaping and ordering and asserting power over the hurtful events. In lyric poems, they're both telling the story from their point of view and also shaping the experience into an order (the poem) that shows they have power over what (in the past) overpowered them.

If shadows could talk they would tell us everything we know already but in the melodious language of tears in which every third word rhymes. from "Some Notes on Shadows

I remember the cloud on its blue bicycle gliding over the leaves under the bare branches. You and I were walking. You wore your long green dress with the hem frayed so the loose threads seemed like tiny roots. We were holding hands when my hand became a yellow scarf and you stood waving it slowly. from "Daffodil Poem

because you've chosen poetry, you're condemned to wonder at skills and felicities of language or imagination in the poems of others that you yourself may never achieve, no matter how hard you work toward them—things that will always be beyond your reach but also will always be luring you on.

A French writer once said that prose is walking, poetry is dancing. That's a fine metaphor for the pleasurable intensification of emotion, language, and rhythm that is at the heart of poetry.

If manipulators of language (and people) use words and phrases to put their listeners under a spell, then poets are people who are themselves under the spell of language.

I'm actually after another notion here—what I've called Quest. Quest has to do with the intersection of your own personal life and the art of poetry in your time and place. It has to do with what you want to do with poetry and what poetry wants to do with you. It has to do with coming to understand who you are and who you hope to be when you are reborn through language and imagination as a poet.

William Butler Yeats was after the same point when he remarked: "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Under Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine.

Horse [Man you will find here a new representation of the universe at its most poetic and most modern Man man man man man man Give yourself up to this art where the sublime does not exclude charm and brilliancy does not blur the nuance it is now or never the moment to be sensitive to poetry for it dominates all dreadfully Guillaume Apollinaire]

My blue mask as a God puts on his sky

Ses mains alors s'épanouirent Comme des fleurs de soir et luirent, Ses yeux dont soudain s'éblouirent Les dormantes glaces d'effroi De voir bayer leur sombre dame, Princesse ou fée ou simple femme

Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin - Zone -