Quotes About Poetry

Now and then I leaf through the small blue volume of Emily Dickinson poems that my teacher, Mrs. Crowley, pressed into my hand. I remember her words to me when I left school: Your mind will be your comfort. It is, sometimes. And sometimes it isn't.

Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley. Our teacher made us memorize the words to "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and alone in the kitchen now I close my eyes and whisper Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time . . . but that's all I can remember.

The poet Swinburne said that spring begins 'blossom by blossom.

Rumi, the great Sufi poet, wrote: Today like every other day we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

And all the winds go sighing, For sweet things dying

I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.

Golden head by golden head, Like two pigeons in one nest Folded in each other's wings, They lay down in their curtained bed: Like two blossoms on one stem, Like two flakes of new-fall'n snow, Like two wands of ivory Tipped with gold for awful kings. Moon and stars gazed in at them, Wind sang to them lullaby, Lumbering owls forbore to fly, Not a bat flapped to and fro Round their rest: Cheek to cheek and breast to breast Locked together in one nest.

When wombats do inspire/I strike my disused lyre

Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in 'In Memory of WB Yeats': "You were silly like us.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

It has seemed to me that, unless our poetry conforms to some stereotypical notion of Native American history and culture in the past tense or unless it depicts spiritual relationship to the natural world of animals and plants and landscape, it goes unrecognized. We do and we do not write of treaties, battles, and drums. We do and we do not write about eagles, spirits, and canyons. Native poetry may be those things, but it is not only those things.

On wings of song, my dearest,I will carry you off.

The cloudlets are lazily sailing O'er the blue Atlantic sea.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

the poetic moment is a static one. It's watching through a window while the action happens elsewhere. And then the poet turns away from the window because the poem is done ... It cannot unflinchingly stare grief down. At some point, by necessity, or design, it must turn away.

For maybe this is how poetry can be of use. Though it can't move with us, we can move it between us, pass it among us, so it is held up by our voices, so it moves with our breath, our living breath.

Women, poets, and especially artists, like cats; delicate natures only can realize their sensitive systems.

Deep in the muddled darkness six copper pheasant feathers glowed in a cradle of blackthorn.

In winter-time visions of Spring and Summer are conjured at will by poets...

There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.

Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.

A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.

what delights the poet is 'unintelligibility' ...(where) language doesn't sound like anything anyone could possibly say in 'real life' or in 'real philosophy.