Quotes About Poetry

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

When a man and a woman die, as poets sung, His heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion and-if he is lucky enough-know the love of an honest woman.

Poetry spills from the cracks of a broken heart, but flows from one which is loved

It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

the doctor gestures at the X-ray where the lung crumples like a tossed poem.

You said: There's a lot of places out there, friend, so you would go, smuggling a suitcase of words across every border carved by the heel of mapmakers or conquerors, because you had an all-night conversation with the world, hearing the beat of unsung poems in every voice, visiting the haunted rooms in every face. Drive, you said, because poets must bring the news to the next town: You got a song, man, sing it. You got a bell, man, ring it.

you mailed your banned poems cloaked as letters to your sister-in-law because the silence of the world was a storm flooding your ears.

Emily Dickinson reminds us what it's like to be alive. And when she does—she takes our breath away.

Karen Dandurand's view that Dickinson did not publish because poetry to her was never finished. She looked upon her verse as constantly in play and the work of a lifetime. Her attitude is reminiscent of Paul Valéry's assessment: "A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

If we read Dickinson's letters looking for action in the usual sense—where she traveled, what chores she did, whom she encountered—we find some details for reconstructing her days, but not many. But if we read the letters for what the poet thought, her interior world opens.

she also shed her youthful need to exaggerate, flaunt her wit, and trot out erudition. She still sent poems to mark an event or nudge someone to write, but her poems became less about what happened and more about what she was thinking. Poems sent in letters . . . rose above daily concerns to larger contemplations on nature, faith, and loss. Images of boats, sailors, and the view from shore appeared frequently.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

The abyss and the light of the world, Time's need and the craving for eternity, Vision, event, and poetry: Was and is dialogue with you.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

Even the most political poem is an act of faith.

In the republic of poetry, the guard at the airport will not allow you to leave the country until you declaim a poem for her and she says Ah! Beautiful.

Nada es tan melancólico como la muerte de la belleza.

If there has been one overriding change in poetic practice, it is that under the influence of free verse the poets have made a primary virtue out of exactitude and economy of meaning: this has replaced metrical skill as the first thing the poet tunes to.

Few of the Arabs could read, but beauty of speech was a virtue which all Arab parents desired for their children. A man's worth was largely assessed by his eloquence, and the crown of eloquence was poetry.

among the Arabs a gifted poet was like a multitude of men, for his verses were repeated from mouth to mouth. If good, he was a power for good; if evil, a power for evil

I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure. . . . When letters have declined and lain prostrate, theology, too, has wretchedly fallen and lain prostrate. . . . It is my desire that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily.

His [Death] voice is cold at first, John. It seems unfeeling. But if you listen without fear, you find that when he speaks, the most ordinary words become poetry. When he stands close to you, your life becomes a song, a praise. When he touches you, your smallest talents become gold; the most ordinary loves break your heart with their beauty.

In the republic of poetry, poets rent a helicopter to bombard the national palace with poems on bookmarks, and everyone in the courtyard rushes to grab a poem fluttering from the sky, blinded by weeping.