Quotes About Poetry

if I could have caught up from the earth, the whole of the flowers of the earth, if once I could have breathed into myself the very golden crocuses and the red, and the very golden hearts of the first saffron, the whole of the golden mass, the whole of the great fragrance, I could have dared the loss. — H.D., from "Eurydice," Collected Poems 1912-1944 (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1982)

????? ????? ????? ????? ????? Moonlight spreads before my bed. I wonder if it's hoarfrost on the ground. I raise my head to watch the moon And lowering it, I think of home. "REFLECTION IN A QUIET

All philosophers must, therefore, doff their hats to the poets when they discover that the path of reason takes them only so far.

To love is to write verses with the words of the infinite.

IN PERSIA I SAW that poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung--for one reason alone--because it works. A right combination of image & tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotional/aesthetic mood & trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping, fits of dancing--measurable physical response to art. For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era--we read under the influence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas.

Standing? says Jak. Ouais, standing, intercrural, AKA the sumata of the Samurai, the Oxford Style , the Princeton First-Year , the Ivy League Rub . Good enough for ensigns of industry, Shaka Zulu, Alexander the Great. The Altercatio Ganymedis et Helene has Zeus extoll the slippery thighs of a boy, as Billy Greene swooned over Lincoln's, as perfect as a human being could be, he said.

Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.

I could feel it--inside, and I decided that night, reading poetry beneath a caged light bulb, that real was when you could fee your whole body light up from within.

Even a cursory reading of the Bible is sufficient to recognize that the Bible is a treasury replete with a wide variety of literary styles, ranging from poetry and psalms to historical narratives, didactic epistles, and apocalyptic revelations. To dogmatically assert that the Bible was written in parables and that those who read it literally must be "idiots" is a serious misunderstanding of the literal principle of biblical interpretation.

The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.

Poetska re? je jednako kao i filozofska u stanju da stoji i da se u odvojenosti "teksta" u kome se artikuliše iskaže sa sopstvenim autoritetom. "Filozofija i poezija

The Anxiety of Influence

[Poems] are necessarily about other poems; a poem is a response to a poem, as a poet is a response to a poet, or a person to his parent.

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.

haiku were not written to be weighed down with commentary. (Buson, p. 103)

too much explanation can take the pleasure out of any poetry. (Preface, vii)

good haiku are full of overtones. The elusiveness that is one of their chief charms comes, not from haziness, but from the fact that so much suggestion is put into so few words. (Characteristics of Haiku, p. 4)

An enthusiastic reader of English poetry, Lincoln forgot or ignored Dryden's warning from "Astraea Redux": "An horrid stillness first invades the ear,/ And in that silence we the tempest fear.

The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively—intuitively—the camera can write poetry.

The Horatian Spanish poet Antonio Machado defined poetry as 'a few true words', a definition that sounds minimal, even despairing, until you reflect on what a few true words can do.