Quotes About Poetry

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.

Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

Nothing in all those "O swan" poems had ever mentioned that they hissed. Or resented being mistaken for felines. Or bit.

Whitman had a profound influence on me. That was during my sophomore year when I came down with a bad attack of Whitmanitis. But he did me a lot of good, and I think the influence is discoverable.

while daisies burn like stars on the darkened hill.

Is it a comb, a fan, a torn dress, a curtain, a bed, an empty rice-bin? It hardly seems to matter. The Chinese poet makes a heart-breaking poetry out of these quite as naturally as Keats did out of the song of a nightingale heard in a spring garden. It is rarely dithyrambic, rarely high-pitched: part of its charm is its tranquility, its self-control. And the humblest reads it with as much emotion as the most learned.

We can twist poet Alexander Pope's diktat—"the sound must seem an echo of the sense"—into a caveat for the novice writer: When sound doesn't echo sense, the writing misfires.

Voices" Ideal and dearly beloved voices of those who are dead, or of those who are lost to us like the dead. Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams; sometimes in thought the mind hears them. And for a moment with their echo other echoes return from the first poetry of our lives — like music that extinguishes the far-off night.

Ideal voices and beloved of those who have died, or of those who are lost to us like the dead. Sometimes, within our dreams, they speak; sometimes the mind can hear them in our thoughts. And with their sound for an instant return sounds from the early poetry of our lifelike music in the night, faraway, that fades.

I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on.

Not yet has my heart or headIn the least way realizedThey and I are civilized.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Then, as a single snowflake flares and flickers upon voicing its final breath, so two eyes make silent conversation with mine. A face as iridescent as candle-fire purls verse and poetry. My eyes read her every intent as a wave of recollections floods my senses.

Poetry by its very nature is subversive . . . It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet.

Because tears look like stars hanging on your eyelashes.

Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom and complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.

What is poetry which does not save nations or people? Czes?aw Mi?osz

There was no castle. You were simply listening to a record. A needle, swaying lightly on a black frozen pond, Led the voices of dead poets out into the sun.

What is poetry which does not save nations or people?

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent; A thing brought forth that we didn't know we had in us, So we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out And stood in the light, licking its tail.

Sometimes the world loses its face. it becomes too base. The task of the poet is to restore its face, because otherwise man is lost in doubt and despair. It is an indication that the world need not always be like this; it can be different. When I wrote...that I accepted the salvational goal of poetry, that was exactly what I had in mind, and I still believe that poetry can either save or destroy nations.

poetry has always been for me a participation in the humanly modulated time of my contemporaries.