Quotes About Poetry

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves.

Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?

I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value. I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you?

Creo en la ficción y en el poder de las historias porque así hablamos a través de lenguas que no son nuestras. No se nos silencia. Todos nosotros, cuando sufrimos un gran trauma, dudamos, tartamudeamos; hay grandes pausas en nuestro discurso. La cosa se atasca. Recuperamos el lenguaje a través del lenguaje de otros. Podemos recurrir al poema. Podemos abrir el libro. Alguien ha estado allí por nosotros y buceó en las palabras.

The poem finds the word that finds the feeling.

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is.

I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea.

She was night-time and words were the dream.

I'd never met a man I would rather spend time with. I loved him for all sorts of reasons: He cooked without recipes; he wrote nonsense poems for his nieces; his large, warm family had accepted me as one of their own.

Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true —Dylan Thomas, 'Poem on His Birthday

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

Pero en el seno mismo de ese éxtasis, acababa de aparecer algo nuevo: yo comprendía la Náusea, la poesía.

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence Before he can accomplish fate, Know his work or choose his mate. Poet and sculptor, do the work, Nor let the modish painter shirk

Every time I read Erin Belieu work I'm pierced in that wonderful way poetry can.

Andrea Gibson is a truly American poet, or rather, she represents the America I want to live in. Her work lights a candle to lead us where we need to go.

My advice to my younger self would have been, "Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out."

All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.

The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man; it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself.

I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.