Quotes About Poetry

Writing fiction has always, for me, been an alchemy of turning pain into poetry, ugliness into beauty. It has been a kind of redemption.

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.

Anyone who says, "Here's my address, write me a poem," deserves something in reply. So I'll tell a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

poems are small moments of enlightenment

This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don't drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.

It's a lot better to sound like Ernest Hemingway than like Aunt Bethune, who thinks Hallmark greeting cards contain the best poetry in America.

Walking home from work that night, I stopped in the Centicore Bookstore on State Street and wandered up and down the aisles. I saw a thin volume of poetry entitled Fruits and Vegetables by Erica Jong. (Jong had not come out with her novel Fear of Flying yet and was still unknown.) The first poem I opened to in the book was about cooking an eggplant!

Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

I wish I had the gift of making rhymes, for methinks there is poetry in my head and heart since I have been in love with you.

I'm not an academic, but I've always loved poetry since I've been small.

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not.

If the impress on the imagination is that of a high poetic form it is not because the poetry is 'allegorically' imposed on the stuff, but because the stuff is allowed to render up its own poetic essences.

I loved you once is among the saddest lines in humanity.

She doesn't know poets can have ash in the soul, or that after so much burning there comes a time when there's nothing left but blowing away or phoenix-rising.

Transcendence is the business of poets. That's what they're for. They're not like you and me. They have that extra bit that's always ready for take-off. Poets understand why God didn't give us wings: he wanted entertainment. He wanted us to aspire, to ascend. He wanted poetry. My

Creo que moriré de poesía

Something Like That PARRA LAUGHS like he's condemned to hell but when haven't poets laughed? at least he declares that he's laughing

Consequently, Sylvia Plath's elevated position among literary figures has extolled her from the depths of depression to the heights of heavenly poetic bliss."

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

Poems do seem to want to announce, over and over, that life's warm zephyrs are blowing past and the gravestones are just beyond the next rise. Little groupings of gravestones, all leaning and cracked, with a rusty black Victorian fence around them. They're just over that rise. Poets never want to forget that. And actually we need to hear that sometimes.

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned.

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.