Quotes About Poetry

The detective story is the sonnet. It is precise, neat, satisfyingly symmetrical, constrained, but sustained, by the nicety of its form… The thriller is the ode. It has no formal rules at all. It has no precise framework. It has no top and, Heaven knows, no bottom.

What is truth?" I said. "Is it the shallow assurance that something literally took place, or is it about something far deeper, something that is profoundly true— on all levels? Not just the literal one. It's like poetry.

I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.

There is a poem at the heart of things and a mythic story in the heart of each of us.

Our answer, our opportunity, our chance to change the world has to come from the poetry that is already written on the walls of the soul.

There is a poem at the heart of things and a mythic story in the heart of each of us. At certain times it is the poetry of life and the mythic imagination of the soul that become necessary in order to heal the wounds inflicted by an excess of reason or an overuse of force.

Each young person is a poet of sorts, trying to sort out the poetics of their inner life and its relation to the great world around it. Each elder is a philosopher of sorts, trying to sort out the meanings and gleanings of a life as well as the necessary implications of the presence of death.

She's a good poet but a very neurotic woman." "Don't the two go together?

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Thus, in The Lion they become monarchs under sovereign Jove; in Prince Caspian they harden under strong Mars; in The Dawn Treader they drink light under searching Sol; in The Silver Chair they learn obedience under subordinate Luna; in The Horse and His Boy they come to love poetry under eloquent Mercury; in the Magicians Nephew they gain life-giving fruit under fertile Venus; and in the Last Battle they suffer and die under chilling Saturn.

We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem that to understand a good one.

Poetry like love risks everything on signs.

La vie qui s'en va en riant / Remplir des entités nouvelles, / La vie n'a pas duré longtemps, / La fin de journée est si belle.

I've more or less finished with the world as narration – the world of novels and films, the world of music as well. I'm now only interested in the world as juxtaposition – that of poetry and painting.

Ninguna cultura del espíritu, me recordó, había sido capaz de desarrollarse jamás en las sociedades con un alto índice de delincuencia, simplemente porque la seguridad física es la condición del pensamiento libre, y ninguna reflexión, ninguna poesía, ningún pensamiento mínimamente creativo ha logrado nacer nunca en un individuo que tenga que preocuparse de su supervivencia, que tenga que estar siempre en guardia.

like Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Mallarmé, then Breton). Their

I'll never be able to give you a sonnet. I may be a songwriter, but the iambic pentameter thing throws me off. So this is what I got: tattered angel comes to me/beguiles and shelters me/pretty sexy dark love/eternity will set us free." "That was perfect." "It's just a start. I'll write songs for you every day," he said. "You are my melody, Kambriel. Together we're the perfect harmony.

The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it.

El azar es el íntimo ritmo del mundo, el azar es el alma de la poesía.

There was a time when it was admirable to be an amateur poet or a dilettante scientist, because it meant that the quality of life could be improved by engaging in such activities. But increasingly the emphasis has been to value behavior over subjective states; what is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance rather than the quality of experience.

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.

Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.

Un lugar tan hermoso no puede existir en realidad. Era literatura, era ficción, y nosotros éramos los personajes de un poema.