Quotes About Poetry

Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Aegean.

Are ye too changed, ye hills?See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar menTonight from Oxford up your pathway strays!Here came I often, often, in old days—Thyrsis [Arthur Hugh Clough] and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

The strongest part of a religion today is its unconscious poetry

The word 'God' is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness — a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs.

Humid the air! Leafless, yet soft as spring. The tender purple spray on copse and briers! And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, she needs not June for beauty's heightening. Lovely all the time she lies...

We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

Is any place more intimate than the place where we create? Where we co-create with the Spirit of God and the Spirit of largesse that inspires our souls where we love? Where we make love? Where we love others through serving them with our labor? Where we love our children? Where we paint our truth? Where we dance our dance? Where we speak our words? Where we work? Where we utter our poetry? The

a blossom past its perfection, shedding petals like a sad metaphor

Somehow, when a person you like reads your poem and says they like it, the poem seems all fresh and new afterwards. I wonder why?

You knew—who knew not Astrophil?

And there are flowers in her hair, always jasmine.

Mis kõige enam lugemist ohustab, on see: lugeja reaalsus, tema isiksus, pretensioonikus ja põikpäisus loetu ees aina iseendaks jääda - inimeseks, kes üldiselt teab, kuidas lugeda. Lugeda luuletust ei tähenda lugeda lihtsalt järjekordset luuletust, see ei tähenda isegi sisenemist luule olemusse selle luuletuse kaudu. Luuletuse lugemine on see luuletus ise, mis ennast lugemises kinnitab.

Poetry does not immortalize the person but the virtue for which the person is notable just as Shakespeare's sonnets promise immortality not to the young man but to his beauty and truth.

I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed.

Not only parallel problems: vision and its signification, speech and its signification--but a single problem: the visible and poetic signified are intertwined; poetry, speech of things (Valéry)... This is not to lose interest in the world; it is to find access through intermixing, through an imaginary within us that welcomes it and makes it at home. In a sense, it discovers it.

Since perception itself is never complete, since ?ur perspectives give us a world to express and think about which envelopes and exceeds those perspectives, a world which announces itself in lightning signs as a spoken word or as an arabesque, why should the expression of the world be subjected to the prose of the senses or of the concept? It must be poetry; that is, it must completely awaken ?nd recall our sheer power of expressing beyond things already said or seen.

la primera ley exigible de la poesía: enseñar la virtud, la indulgencia y el amor al prójimo, además de servir, en caso de ataque, de arma arrojadiza.

By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.

Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

It's doneon a diamond,and for fun.It's abouthome, and it'sabout run.

I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.