Quotes About Poetry

O fairer daughter of a fair mother!

"Painters and poets," you say, "have always had an equal license in bold invention." We know; we claim the liberty for ourselves and in turn we give it to others.

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet.

Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or man.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry" Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned to pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you couldn't tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

A poem reaches out exactly halfway, then you reach out halfway, then see what happens. If your thinking's willful and generous toward a poem, the poem'll be equally those things back. As for meaning, it'll mean something different to each person.

On July 26 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

Chesterton never achieves a great poem because his poems are compilations of statements not intensely felt but only intensely meant.

I bring in my heart the weeping and crying Caribbean Orinoco.

the activity of modern poets stands under the decree of necessity, as though they were building a pyramid, the monstruos residence of a dead King or an unborn God.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

Poetry could be a brilliant antidote to some of our current cultural problems...our collective attention deficit.

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.

That became the signature Ice-T style - rhymes that were "topical" and "vividly optical." To me it was street-level journalism, real-life observations told in poetry. That's the vision I tried to bring to all my recordings.

The great poet Hafiz says that you should dye your prayer-carpet with wine if your teacher tells you to do so.

I've burnt all the holy pages I used to carry but poems flare in my heart

It could be said that the lectures changed the way many people thought about myth, fairy story, and poetry, and even about the relationship of imagination to thought and to language. One of the brilliant but cryptic insights he expressed was: 'To ask what is the origins of stories … is to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind.