Quotes About Poetry

Remember we are mortal but poetry is not.

Nothing is more dangerous than science without poetry or technical progress without emotional content," wrote Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a German philosopher.

The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself.

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

La poesía es algo hermoso, pero no vale la pena que se te congele el culo por ella.

Poets are everywhere now, but they talk only to each other

From poetry to justice, then. Poetic justice, if you will. For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.

That's why your poems can never be no more than a description of life. The page is finite. Once you put the words down on paper, you've fossilized your thought. Bugs in amber, nigger. But music is life itself. Music is time. Played live, played at seventy-eight rpms, thirty-three and a third, backwards, looped, whatever. There's no need for translation. You understand or you don't.

It's funny I want to write a poem.

Or consider why economics is sometimes called "the dismal science." It's a derogatory description thought up by Thomas Carlyle in the 1800s, coined to draw a contrast with the "gay science" of music and poetry: "Not a 'gay science,' I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.

The poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a language fragment, thus, as far as language manages to be world, freighted with world.

Wherever one went the world was blooming. And yet despair gave birth to poetry.

There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

Erst wenn ich dich als Schatten berühre, glaubst du mir meinen Mund, der klettert mit Spät- sinnigem droben in Zeithöfen umher, du stößt zur Heerschar der Zweitverwerter unter den Engeln, Schweigewütiges sternt.

The poem is lonely. It is lonely and enroute. — from "The Meridian

Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng

Every Artist is a Cannibal,every Poet is a Thief.All kill for inspiration and sing about their grief

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

The last poem of the first group, beginning `O thou, my lovely boy', is not a strict sonnet, being a series of six rhyming pentameter couplets, as if the sonnet were entirely made up of conclusions.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

I find everything poetic, and it's in the corners of my heart which are sometimes mysterious that I catch a glimpse of poetry… I feel a sensation that leads me into a poetic state…