Quotes About Poetry

I would say that when I write prose I'm a more socially responsible person. I'm much more a citizen of the world. But the instability of the poetry, the emotional jaggedness, is also me.

I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.

Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Then to Silvia let us sing that Silvia is excelling. She excels each mortal thing upon the dull earth dwelling.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.

It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: 'Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience)

All poets who, when reading from their own works,m experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.

I guess my poems feel to me a bit like they are doing something in relation to experience, i.e. time.

Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it's the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it's a failure in communication.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Roses are red, violets are blue. Pull me closer and whisper, 'I love you,'