Quotes About Poetry

Qué era la poesía, en realidad, esa palabra vergonzosa? ¿Era encontrarse cuando, casualmente, caía una lluvia repentina sobre la ciudad? ¿O tal vez mirar al mismo tiempo, mientras tomaba un refresco, el rostro de una mujer que pasaba por la calle? ¿O incluso encontrarse casualmente en la vieja noche de luna y viento.

que façam harpas de meus nervos quando eu morrer.

Por isso a poesia dos poetas que sofreram é doce, terna. E a dos outros, dos que de nada foram privados, é ardente, sofredora e rebelde.

Clark Ashton Smith

A PRECEPT With words of ivory, Of bronze, of ebony, Of alabaster, marble, steel, and gold, The beauty of the visible is told. But how with these express The unseen Loveliness— Splendour and light, and harmony, and sound, The heart hath felt, the sense hath never found? No shining words of stone— Shadow and cloud alone— These shall the poet seek eternally, Whose lines would carve the mask of Mystery.

Twenty times a day, twenty different beings demand and receive from us the gift of what is best within us: our whole life offered forever in a moment. Perhaps these miracles demand darkness and silence? Then it will not be a novelist but a poet who will come to reveal them to us in whispers. And we'll pretend to not have understood in order to continue to be able to understand.

As a poet, I want to use language to enter that space of feeling." —

Great poetry is capable of dealing with erotic passion, but it has to be the very greatest to represent that deeper and more tortuous love -- more rooted, more absolute -- which we devote to our children, and which it is so hard to talk about.

True poetry ought to be secret and clandestine, concealed like a prohibited voice of dissent, while at the same time it should speak to everyone.

Sabías que la poesía no es jamás sólo tuya, como el amor, sino de todos; no es el poeta el que crea las palabras, decías y declamabas, es la palabra la que se le hecha encima y le hace poeta...

El desencanto es un oxímoron, una contradicción que el intelecto no puede resolver y que sólo la poesía puede expresar y custodiar

The poet wants to 'say' something. Why, then, doesn't he say it directly and fortrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether.

If we allow ourselves to be misled by the heresy of paraphrase, we run the risk of doing even more violence to the internal order of the poem itself. By taking the paraphrase as our point of stance, we misconceive the function of metaphor and meter. We demand logical coherences where they are sometimes irrelevant, and we fail frequently to see imaginative coherences on levels where they are highly relevant.

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

You are a poet in your own right. Just free your mind and unleash the goodness in your heart to prove the hallmark of human talent and purpose.

Wine is] poetry in a bottle.

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

The movement Of the body is Where poetry Begins

That amazing thing doesn't need my poem, but my poem still needs it, the way every poem still needs all the world.

and he wrote the single most famous poem about the death camps, "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue).

Until then, most of my poems had been devotedly incomprehensible. Now they were becoming comprehensible, a transformation that would have allowed me to detect their sentimentality if they had not been so true to my feelings, which were sentimental.

Isn't a blank verse paragraph just a chunk of prose bent around corners after every five beats? Try doing that and you'll not only get lines that don't scan, you'll also get, and all too often, the one effect that you definitely don't want: successive lines that rhyme.

Leaving aside the consideration that academics might always favour poetic difficulty—it makes them indispensable—

I have found the title of the book as impossible to forget as the poems in it were impossible to remember.