Quotes About Poetry

he sees squirming roots trampled under the foliage of his mind by the holiday crowds as by the feet of the straining minister. From his eyes sparrows start and sing. His ears are toadstools, his fingers have begun to sprout leaves (his voice is drowned under the falls) . Poet, poet! sing your song, quickly! or not insects but pulpy weeds will blot out your kind.

Poets are damned, but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.

RIPOSTE Love is like water or the air my townspeople; it cleanses, and dissipates evil gases. It is like poetry too and for the same reasons. Love is so precious my townspeople that if I were you I would have it under lock and key— like the air or the Atlantic or like poetry!

I have always associated [Al Que Quiere!] with a figure on a soccer field: to him who wants the ball to be passed to him. [...] I was convinced nobody in the world of poetry wanted me but I was there willing to pass the ball if anyone did want it.

But though I have felt free only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held me firm at such times, yet being of a slow but accurate understanding, I have not always been able to complete the intellectual steps which would make me firm in the position. So most of my life has been lived in hell -- a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

Who gathers the withered rose?

The trouble with modern verse is, that to comprehend it you must have recently passed through an emotional experience identical with that through which the poet himself has recently passed. The poetry of modern poets is like a pair of shoes that only those whose feet are shaped like the cobbler's feet, can wear; while the old boys turned out shoes that anybody who can walk at all can wear.

Poetry is] a kind of childlike faith in the efficacy of words, you see, a kind of belief that circumstance somehow will invest the veriest platitude with magic.

But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human.

Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant satisfaction to the thought. This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.

All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it

But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain dealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?

With the city like this, don't we have greater needs than poetry?

The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor's domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

According to Charles Olsen, the best poetry is a kind of schizophrenia. The poem does not "express" the poet's thoughts or feelings. It is "a transfer of energy between the poet and the reader".

Well, that explains the repeated commission of wanton acts of poetry. I was starting to feel like I was being punished for my earthly sins by being trapped in an A. S. Byatt novel.

I have epiphanies all the time, because I'm always thinking. I'm a thinker. I'm always writing poetry, I'm always coming to conclusions.

Aber alles, was wir aussprechen, muss wahr sein, weil wir es empfinden. Da haben Sie mein poetisches Geständnis

Apenas nos dijimos otra cosa que nuestros nombres, pero nunca había oído un poema de amor más bello.

Die Trichter Zwei Trichter wandeln durch die Nacht. Durch ihres Rumpfs verengten Schacht fließt weißes Mondlicht still und heiter auf ihren Waldweg u.s. w.

When I try to describe how I feel when you hold me, I get butterflies, I hear lullabies, it's hard to explain -- like the scent of a rose or the sound of the rain. It's too precious and too wonderful to give it a name.

She offers me a bull's-eye sweet, which she's stashed in her apron pocket with a half-dozen half-smoked Afton butts—a mix of flavors I'll never forget. On the front of the yellow cigarette box is a poem by Robert Burns that Gram likes to sing to an old Irish tune: Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes. Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise.