Quotes About Poetry

Too poetical that about the sad. Music did that. Music hath charms Shakespeare said. Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be. Wisdom while you wait.

often she wondered why you couldn't eat something poetical like violets or roses

It was a distinction, my dear Dorian — a great distinction. Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

That is how poets write, the similar sounds. But then Shakespeare has no rhymes: blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts. Solemn.

White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs march ing.

The wind smelled of humus, lichen, the musky odor of pecan husks broken under the shoe, a sunshower on the fields across the bayou. But any poetry that might have been contained in that moment was lost when I stared into Honoria's face, convinced that human insanity was as close to our fingertips as the act of rubbing fog off a window pane.

How do you get mad at a man who speaks in Petrarchan sonnets?

when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets.

Mathematics isn't just science, it is poetry – our efforts to crystallise the unglimpsed connections between things. Poetry that bridges and magnifies the mysteries of the galaxy. But the signs and symbols and equations sentients employ to express these connections are not discoveries but the teasing out of secrets that have always existed.

I love the swing and swirl of words as they tangle with human emotions.

Therefore, poets do not 'fit' into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their 'places' seriously. They openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed and its metaphysics ideological.

True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than awareness that poets-that is, creators of all sorts-seek. They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.

I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic, in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles. Are they necessarily inseparable? Is man really so much of a philosopher, that he can conceive of truth in its abstract purity, and divest life and the affections of all the aids of the imagination?

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.

Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus.

Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns.

Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.

Not until the human heart is stolid to poetry, the human eye blind to beauty, not until the intellect ceases its quest for truth and conscience finds its quietus either in universal defeat or in triumphant success, will organized religion cease to be.

'Milk and Honey' was written with me being honest to myself, kind of pulling at the things that I hear the most and saying that out loud, and you know, that thing that we hear the most is most universal, and so that rings true with all folks. The language used in the poetry is extremely, extremely accessible.

One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations.

What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.