Quotes About Poetry

Nothing is so improving to the temper as the study of the beauties either of poetry, eloquence, music, or painting.

Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision unapproachable by any other means.

Poetry is music written for the human voice.

I am from the Mediterranean area, I have to feel everything. I am a physical person, but I guess that things that you cannot touch and cannot see are also touchable and visible—light, poetry, music.

Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind.

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Be aroused by poetry; structure yourself with propriety, refine yourself with music.

A poem should not mean but be.

I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.

Any work that is not rooted in myth and poetry or that does not partake of the depth and essence of the universe is merely a ghost.

In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.

Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.

Soho has got to be at its centre. It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers, all those things, and I think it should be valued as such, and protected as this centre for bohemia.

It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.

Most people are trying to go digital, and trying to do different things with poetry. McSweeney's is going in the opposite direction - going more classic, and retro, which is all coming back.

Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

Where there are many beauties in a poem I shall not cavil at a few faults proceeding either from negligence or from the imperfection of our nature.

Poetry's object is truth.

Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems