Quotes About Poetry

Always learn poems by heart," she said. "They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

Solo perchè un poeta dice qualcosa non significa che sia vero, ma solo che suona bene.

What if he…" But I didn't want to say die…dying was a matter for professionals, not poets.

Those who love poetry, even my unreadable foreign brand, are a tender breed.

Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem.

Poems, unlike songs, are written to be read and, thus, come equipped with their own rhythms and melodies; they're self-contained entities, the whole shebang.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, I never indulge in poetics - Unless I am down with rheumatics.

When Keats says: 'Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses', what he means is that we don't necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.

I can't know entirely what's at stake beforehand; you find out as you go. I love to take a poem, for instance, that starts with something seemingly frivolous or inconsequential and then grows in gravity until by the end it's something very serious.

If you're writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you're reading a poem that's written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you're not going to see the thing whole in the song. You're going to hear it in series, and you can't skip back.

Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.

In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.

I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don't affect your work.

I want to learn how to speak Urdu. I find it very interesting and soothing to ears. It is very poetic too.

I was fascinated with Urdu ever since I was a child.

...Neruda was right about all mysterious women - The moon lives in the lining of their skin...

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

Poetry is subconscious conversation, it is as much the work of those who understand it and those who make it.

You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.

I often think of my work as visual haiku. It is an attempt to evoke and suggest through as few elements as possible rather than to describe with tremendous detail.

I use poetry to help me work through what I don't understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I've been.

Alekhine is a poet who creates a work of art out of something that would hardly inspire another man to send home a picture post card.