Quotes About Poetry

To quote the poets... we're fucked.

He was young, no older than fifteen, pale and dark-haired, wearing jeans and a soft white T-shirt that had SHAKESPEARE HATES YOUR EMO POEMS written across the chest.

It's a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.

As great poets do, he found a way to transmute the personal wound into something larger.

Poetry exists to find words for what resists easy naming; we are most often driven to write it or read it when any other sort of language seems incapable of the work required.

The life of the poem might be extended in ways you cannot know, and continue in a world so far from yours as to be nearly unimaginable. The circle that is the outer edge of your life extends, and goes on extending.

It thrills me that I don't know why; the fact that poems do things they should not be able to do, through means not fully apprehensible--well, it makes me treasure them all the harder.

What does being on earth ask of us? The world wants to be rescued from evanescence, to be translated into an immaterial realm that does not perish because it was never exactly alive. To become, in other words, poetry--either in the poem the poet writes out of engagement with things, or in the interior "poem" of anyone who loves the world, the never-said words we come, over time, to carry within us.

Language, a great poem in and of itself, is all around us. We live in the lap of enormous wonder, but how rarely do most of us look up and smile in gratitude and pleasure?

Poetry -- literature in general -- is the major cultural source of vital options for those who find that their lives fall short of their highest hopes. Literature is, I believe, our best goad toward new beginnings, our best chance for what we might call secular rebirth... in literature there abide major hopes for human renovation.

Let other poets raise a fracas Bout vines, an' wines, an' drucken Bacchus, An' crabbit names an' stories wrack us, An' grate our lug: I sing the juice Scotch bear can mak us, In glass or jug." Evans smiled at Stewart in confusion. "Burns on scotch, Mr Evans. A very fine poet and a very fine drink.

Jones's faithful old friend and chronicler O. B. Keeler, now fifty-five and still covering the sport for the Atlanta Journal, was on hand to witness his victory and interviewed Byron in the locker room afterward. The unfailingly literate Keeler mentioned that Byron's back nine charge had put him in mind of Lord Byron's poem about Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. His headline the next day read: "LORD BYRON WINS MASTERS.

Besides, the fact that Marsh would refer to a lady as 'the prettiest little vertebrate' probably wasn't the sort of poetry that would win hearts.

The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.

The English were fascinated with the Italian people and their amazing Epicurean culture. Italian poetry, painting, pornography, music, drama, fashion, wine, women, cheese, anything Italiano was a premium commodity in London during Shakespeare's day.

To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.

If a man finishes a poem,he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passionand be kissed by white paper.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

If a man publicly denounces poetry,His shoes will fill with urine.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.