Quotes About Poetry

Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.

But the last century of the Republic was more than a mere bloodbath. As the flowering of poetry, theory and art suggests, it was also a period when Romans grappled with the issues that were undermining their political process and came up with some of their greatest inventions, including the radical principle that the state had some responsibility for ensuring that its citizens had enough to eat.

Once the outcome is known, it is easy to present the period as a series of irrevocable and brutal steps in the direction of crisis or as a slow countdown to both the end of the free state and the return of one-man rule. But the last century of the Republic was more than a mere bloodbath. As the flowering of poetry, theory and art suggests, it was also a period when Romans grappled with the issues that were undermining their political process and came up with some of their greatest inventions

Love is the poetry of our feelings. But there are some horrible poems.

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

Come live with me and be my love, and we will some new pleasures prove, of golden sands, and crystal beaches, with silken lines and silver hooks...

And I will make thee beds of roses, And a thousand fragrant posies.

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

Like music on the waters is they sweet voice to me.

One day You will take my heart completely and make it more fiery than a dragon. Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet.

I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as one loves certain dark things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Marriage...a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters written in prose.

Children delight in poetry if they are not frightened away by adults' fear of poetry.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.

The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

And when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something , until in the end, you begin to suspect a poet is someone who is moved by everything , who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and laughs and weeps (the mysteries, said Aristotle, are the saying of many ridiculous and many serious things).

I do not think I really have anything to say about poetry other than remarking that it is a wandering little drift of unidentified sound, and trying to say more reminds me of following the sound of a thrush into the woods on a summer's eve - if you persist in following the thrush it will only recede deeper and deeper into the woods; you will never actually see the thrush (the hermit thrush is especially shy), but I suppose listening is a kind of knowledge, or as close as one can come." (viii)

If your teachers suggest that your poems are sentimental, that is only half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Don't be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time?

Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet.

To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again