Quotes About Poetry

Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained.

A poetry reading builds up to a climax, and if it's a success it leaves the audience somewhat high." —Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am a hill where poets run. I invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes who made letters with their legs. I am a lake upon a plain. I am a word in a tree. I am a hill of poetry. I am a raid on the inarticulate. I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out but my tongue lived to tell the tale. For I am a still of poetry. I am a bank of song. I am a playerpiano in an abandoned casino on a seaside esplanade in a dense fog still playing.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it's the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it's a failure in communication.

I have seen giraffes in junglejims their necks like love wound around the iron circumstances of the world.

We must therefore entertain the hypothesis that there is an important connection between being 'dialectical' and dreaming, just as there is between dreaming and poetry or mysticism."21

every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. and, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. it really is the most poetic thing i know about physics: you are all stardust.

In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.

In these transparent-clouded, gentle skies, Wherethrough the moist beams of the soft June sun Might any moment break, no sorrow lies, No note of grief in swollen brooks that run, No hint of woe in this subdued, calm tone Of all the prospect unto dreamy eyes.

Sweet empty sky of June without a stain, Faint, gray-blue dewy mists on far-off hills Warm, yellow sunlight flooding mead and plain, That each dark copse and hollow overfills; The rippling laugh of unseen, rain-fed rills, Weeds delicate-flowered, white and pink and gold, A murmur and a singing manifold.

Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.

Lo--a black line of birds in wavering thread Bore him the greetings of the deathless dead!

When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.

The involuntary poetry of one who is not fluent in the language.

Sifting through the sieve of branches, a dusting of sugar over the cereal of dead leaves. An inch of snow accumulated through the night: slow, slow confectioners' sugar coming down through the thick limbs of fir and maple and oak.

The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth--along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets--have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless.

It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker.

A great actor is independent of the poet; because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in the prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.

Saying all one feels and thinks In clever daffodils and pinks; In puns of tulips and in phrases, Charming for their truth, of daisies.

The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy.

You write poetry?" Klaus asked. He had read a lot about poets but had never met one. "Just a little bit," Isadora said modestly. "I write poems down in this notebook. It's an interest of mine." "Sappho!" Sunny shrieked, which meant something like, "I'd be very pleased to hear a poem of yours!

Yes, I know," Isadora said, and then read her poem, leaning forward so Carmelita Spats would not overhear: "I would rather eat a bowl of vampire bats than spend an hour with Carmelita Spats." The Baudelaires giggled and then covered their mouths so nobody would know they were laughing at Carmelita. "That was great," Klaus said. "I like the part about the bowl of bats.