Quotes About Poetry

Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.

For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.

It's a beautiful way to put it: Leave the poetry in what you make. When something becomes too polished, it loses its soul. It seems robotic.

That 'gleeful darting of the house martins' stuff sounds suspiciously like the work of Jade-under-Lime's resident verse mercenary, Gerald Henna-Rose.

O era su pertenencia a la UJA la pequeña verdad con que Marco había amasado las mentiras de su primera posguerra —la minúscula poesía épica con que había intentado teñir la prosa general de su vida—, del mismo modo que su estancia en el frente del Segre era la pequeña verdad con que había amasado sus mentiras de la guerra?

Nunca he entendido por qué tengo que leer sobre cosas que no han pasado cuando puedo leer sobre cosas que pasan de verdad. La poesía es eso, lo que pasa de verdad.

The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand … We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.

Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. It insists on living its own life.

It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious... Poetry is a religion without hope.

Poetry is a machine that manufactures love. Its other virtues escape me.

I constantly regretted having to cut out bits of intense poetry. But one mustn't, at any cost, be seduced by an attractive idea if it hasn't got its right place.

Je sais que la poésie est indispensable, mais je ne sais pas à quoi.

Si vous voulez que je vous dise quel est le drâme de la poésie : c'est que la poésie est, malgré tout, un privilège aristocratique de naissance ; et que tous les privilèges conduise directement à la guillotine.

La poésie ressemble à la mort. Je connais son Å"il bleu. Il donne la nausée. Cette nausée d'architecte toujours taquinant le vide, voilà le propre du poète. Le poète est, comme nous, invisible aux vivants.

The sun's last finger let go of the pine up there. The sun fell behind the hills. A few drops of blood splashed the sky. Night washed them out with her grey hand.

les beaux bras ronds des femmes, les lèvres qui s'appointent

El amor es una gran cosa poética que es preciso no espantar.

I must remember about chandeliers and dancing, about swans and roses and snow.

The sensuality of desperate lives. Only poets talk like that. But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does it bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.

But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does is bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied.

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say 'I think' we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.