Quotes About Poetry

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.

I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.

It's a common notion that if you like Tagore, then he must have had an influence on your life. While I like Tagore's poetry and his thoughts, he doesn't influence my work.

I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I'm enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.

I tell you, once a girl's got a dose of novels she's a pushover for iambic pentameter.

There's something about beautiful moments in sports that alters our experience of time. And I'd say the same thing about poetry and gardening. Gardening slows me down. I want to stop and observe everything.

If you observe, all classic love songs have a tinge of melancholy that comes naturally with the composition.

Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away

There was a way, of course, to deal with the papers. If the ears of the reporters were geared to capture accurately the mediocre remarks of mediocre men, then one had to look for simple salient statements, so poetically bare, but so irreducible, that they would stick in the reporter's mind like a thorn.

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

Eroticism is] the poetry of the body, the testimony of the senses. Like a poem, it is not linear, it meanders and twists back on itself, shows us what we do not see with our eyes, but in the eyes of our spirit. Eroticism reveals to us another world, inside this world. The senses become servants of the imagination, and let us see the invisible and hear the inaudible.

To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile

There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.

La poesía mueve al poeta como el viento a las nubes quietas: siempre más allá, hacia lo desconocido.

The difficulty of modern poetry does not stem from its complexity, but rather from the fact that, like mysticism or love, it demands total surrender—and an equally total vigilance.

La poesía debe ser un poco seca para que arda bien, y de este modo iluminarnos y calentarnos.

A história é um conhecimento que se situa entre a ciência propriamente dita e a poesia. O saber histórico não é quantitativo, nem o historiador pode descobrir leis históricas. O historiador descreve como o cientista e tem visões como o poeta. (...) A história nos dá uma compreensão do passado e, por vezes, do presente. Mais do que um saber, é uma sabedoria.

Trees heavy with birds hold the afternoon up with their hands. — Octavio Paz, from "THE TOMB Of AMIR KHUSRU," A Tale of Two Gardens (New Directions, 1997)

La poesía es el punto de intersección entre el poder divino y la libertad humana.

Cada poema es único. En cada obra late, con mayor o menor grado, toda la poesía. Cada lector busca algo en el poema. Y no es insólito que lo encuentre: Ya lo llevaba dentro.

La poesía nos hace tocar lo impalpable y escuchar la marea del silencio cubriendo un paisaje devastado por el insomnio.

I suspect I do not like kisses in general--perhaps my blood is stirred by poetry alone--but I have no grounds for comparison.

For me, poetry is the unexpected utterance of the soul. It is where the soul touches the everyday. It is less about words and more about the awakening the sense of aliveness we carry within us from birth. To walk quietly till the miracle in everything is poetry. whether we write it down or not.

For me, poetry is the unexpected utterance of the soul. It is where the soul touches the everyday. It is less about words and more about awakening the sense of aliveness we carry within us from birth. To walk quietly till the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.