Quotes About Poetry

I don't understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!

I think of my feather pen as something magical that still belongs to a wing. All I need is paper, ink, and the courage to let wild words soar.

I feel at home, choosing to live inside my own imagination, savage and natural, yet I also long to be honest about my desire to love and be loved. Am I an unearthly creature, part vampire, part werewolf? Or perhaps... poetry is my beastly mind's only curse.

I enjoy peaceful moments when the whole world seems to be flowing river of verse and all I have to do is learn how to swim.

There's a thing in poetry called the caesura a pause between words, a silence. I thought: that's what real friendship is, too. Someone you can be quiet with. Someone who understands your mistakes and forgives you.

My dad used to say that giving someone a poem is like gifting them a feeling. Everything will change from black and white into color.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

It is through beauty, poetry and visionary power that the world will be renewed.

We don't like flowers that donot wilt; they must die, and nineshe-camel hairs aid memory.

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.

Nor till the poets among us can be"literalists ofthe imagination"—aboveinsolence and triviality and can presentfor inspection, "imaginary gardens with realtoads in them," shall we have it.

when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination" --above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have it.

You've the beat of a dancer to a measure or harmonious rush of a porpoise at the prow where the racers all win easily— like centaurs' legs in tune, as when kettledrums compete; nose rigid and suede nostrils spread, a light left hand on the rein, till well—this is a rhapsody.

Might verse not best confuse itself with fate?

EDITOR'S NOTES Poetry Diary of Tolstoy; Dutton, p. 84: "Where the boundary between prose and poetry lies, I shall never be able to understand. The question is raised in manuals of style, yet the answer to it lies beyond me. Poetry is verse: prose is not verse. Or else poetry is everything with the exception of business documents and school books.

Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.

Poetry is telling something to someone.

Poetry is priceless.... a way of keeping yourself feeling rich and civilized even when you're quite poor.

Eugene Peterson claims that "to eyes that can see, every bush is a burning bush:' Poems, when they are doing what they do best, offer us a glimpse of that fire.

The exercise of the imagination is the training ground of compassion. Stories educate the heart. Stories, like poetry, are related to prayer.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.