Quotes About Poetry

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

In some ways this was Goethe's greatest achievement: the search for the serial relationships in nature, emphasizing border experiences, the junctures where "the real joints of nature" are located, is most likely to reveal the process of change, development, organizing principles. This is also why it needed individuals who were both poet and scientist, who could combine "imagination, observation and thought in the act of language.

He who can describe how his heart is ablaze is burning on a small pyre] ~ Petrarch, Sonnet 137 (from Montaigne, On sadness)

One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.

I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest of suspicions.

Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.

No one, not even Shakespeare, surpasses Milton in his command of the sound, the music, the weight and taste and texture of English words.

No literary work longer than a haiku is going to be entirely without faults.

Poetry is not a fancy way of giving you information; it's an incantation. It is actually a magic spell. It changes things; it changes you." An interview with Philip Pullman.

Del inclinado tejado colgaban mágicas hileras de lámparas que refulgían cual estrellas y brillantes faroles de aceite que proyectaban luz… John Milton

The classroom is a torture chamber , interrogating poetry until it confesses.

Muchas veces me he enamorado de la placentera muerte… John Keats

You can store us like shoes or ship us like lettuce. The simpleton who invented the coffin was a poetic genius and a great wit.

Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician. [Upon hearing that one of his students had dropped out to study poetry]

There is a story that some years ago an interested mother wrote to a principal of a school, 'Don't teach my boy poetry, he's going to run for Congress.' I've never taken the view that the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart." They are united, Kennedy suggests, because their greatness depends on "courage"—it is what makes, as Frost might put it, "all the difference.

It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.

but all of a sudden they're poets, right, like that's all it takes — being in love.

Neither of them had ever picked up a pen in their life, but all of a sudden they're poets, right, like that's all it takes—being in love.

If you write a phrase and think, 'Wow, that's really poetic, that's really pretty, I really nailed it,' you get rid of it [because] you've overdone it.

Alliteration seems to offend people.

Una poetisa muerta de cáncer en su juventud había dicho en uno de sus poemas que para ella, en las noches de insomnio, la noche ofrece sapos, perros negros y cadáveres de ahogados

Haiku are tiny seventeen-syllable poems that seek to convey a sudden awareness of beauty by a mating of opposite or incongruous terms.