Quotes About Poetry

Lila Wingo would take the raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic.

My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.

I realized that words were sometimes nothing more than notes you wrote to your deepest self as you fought to articulate the splendor and the magic and the ineluctable sense of loss that you felt in the swift, disturbing hours.

No song, no peace, no poetry, no end of days, and no forgetting.

What you say, when you say a word. What you think when you say it. What I see and hear when you speak. Words are ancient; visions and echoes cling to them like barnacles on the whale's back. You speak words used in poetry and song since the beginning of the world we know. Here, you will learn to hear and to speak as if you had never listened, never spoken before. Then you will learn the thousand meanings within the word. What you say when you say fire.

We have withdrawn into ourselves not out of horror, but out of a need to reconstruct the patterns we have called truth. In the very fabric of the realm, its settlement, history, tales, war, poetry, its riddles - if there is an answer there, a shape of truth that holds itself, we will find it.

The wine in her head promised music or poetry or truth, but she was stranded on the brink. Therese could not think of a single question that would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous

She was music, poetry, and the enchantment which lies just over the edge of thought.

A train is a poem that will take you anywhere you want to go.

Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

Poetry reaches to the realm beyond the world of sight and sound to reveal what our senses long to see and hear. It is the language not so much of the sublime, but of the truly real.

The Divine Comedy.

I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet's world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy.

Philosophical poetry by moonlight was all right, but guns that shot straight and true were a necessity.

Marmon Hamlit on "AllNet Now!" issued the final deathblow: "Oh, the poetry thing from Whathisname—couldn't read it. Didn't try."    Tyrena

I learned that poets aren't God, but if there is a God … or anything approaching a God … he's a poet. And a failed one at that.

Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth.

When you meet a swordsman/ meet him with a sword Do not offer a poem to anyone but a poet]

I teach him how to pair such technique with masculine or feminine caesura, or the joys of alternating iambic foot with unstressed pyrrhic, or the self-indulgence of the frequent spondee. I

Mis primeros poemas eran lamentables. Como la mayoría de los malos poetas, yo no me daba cuenta de ello, seguro en mi arrogancia de que el simple acto de crear daba cierto valor a los indignos abortos que alumbraba.

This is poetry. You're writing about Heaven's Gate and the Caribou Herd, but what comes across is loneliness, displacement, angst, and a cynical look at humanity.

Would it always matter? Lines from a Delmore Schwartz poem come to mind: "What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest

This is written in miserable doggerel verse. That Defoe should have mistaken it for poetry, and should have prided himself upon it accordingly, is only a proof of how incompetent an author is to pass judgment upon what is good and what is bad in his own work.