Quotes About Poetry

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it it was my great refuge through adolescence.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.

The siren of the springs of guilty song— Let us take her on the incandescent wax Striated with nuances, nervosities That we are heir to

Her very frowns are fairer far Than smiles of other maidens are.

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

The best answer I can give is that poetry is all about the effect it has on a reader, and Robert Frost was very, very good at that. If you're asking whatit MEANS that the line is repeated [and miles to go before I sleep] I'd have to say I don't know. It's stylistic. But the effect is pretty clear.

A poem is not an expression, nor it is an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is Is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.

Indeed poetry is bounded by silence on all sides, is almost defined by silence. from "Fallacies of Silence

Meiner Ansicht nach bedeutet Spiritualität, lebendig-sein. Ein geistiger Mensch, der zur Schönheit der Poesie erwacht ist, der für die Schönheit von Melodie und Harmonie empfänglich ist, der sich an Kunst erfreut und sich von der Schönheit der Natur begeistern lässt, der als lebendiges Wesen lebt, und nicht als ein totes, diesen Menschen kann man spirituell nennen. (S. 280)

She was, [Wilfrid Riley] recalled, "a very clever person, but you couldn't be at ease with her some way. She wasn't with you. She was up in the clouds, always studying poetry, what have you . . . You couldn't sit with her and converse with her like you can normal people." It wasn't pride, he thought, that made her this way. "Shyness came into it. She couldn't lend herself to people. She was a little bit aloof from people, and I don't think she intended to be.

This was a time when Movement poets such as Donald Davie, Elizabeth Jennings, John Wain, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis dominated the post-war British poetry scene. Luke would later describe the Movement as "an expression of logic rather than myth, 'classical,' and esteemed principally as an instrument of stability." Hughes felt similarly. He associated the Movement poems with 'the post-war mood of having had enough.

Have lunch, have coffee, and continue to work hard on the things that won't dry up and blow away: Your health, your career, your little art projects or poems or essays, your odd new half-interests, the complicated folds of your sensitivity and your darkness, and your belief in a world that wants you to be happy.

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul. —Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself

Poems are surmountable. They have rhymes and rhythms to help you make meaning. They're short enough. . . to read and reread until you've made some sense of them. Short stories are a different ballgame. You read them and understand the words completely. You know what happens in each sentence. You follow the dialogue and action. at the end, you know exactly what's happened. And also you have no idea.

If you look closer, if you go slowly, there can be story even without progress or plot, life in small change, like Dante and Beatrice, like fish swimming hard against the current just to stay where they are. They're not getting anywhere, neither Dante nor the fish, but that doesn't mean there isn't effort, growth, triumph, and beautiful poetry. Trust me, stasis is challenging. And challenge is story.

What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

Que se disent deux cœurs qui s'aiment ? Rien.

Ma poésie ne consistera qu'à attaquer, par tous les moyens, l'homme, cette bête fauve, et le Créateur, qui n'aurait pas dû engendrer une pareille vermine.

Don't talk to me any more about poetry for months -- unless it is other men's work. I really love verse, even rubbish. But I'm fearfully busy at a novel, and brush all the gossamer of verse off my face.

My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.

Decide if a poem is a question or a declaration, a meditation or an outcry.