Quotes About Poetry

But it was hard for Poetry to stay angry very long. Nearly everything anybody said or did reminded him of a poem.

Eres tú flor carnal de mi jardin ideal.

Philosophers and poets may be truth seekers. Lawyers only want to win.

Poetry served as a sort of intellectual wallpaper to brighten up the closet.

How do you think poetry helps people? he'd ask, wanting the whole thing quantified so he could compare it to digging wells in the Peace Corps.

When you are gay and alone and want to be a poet, suicide crosses your mind at twenty-two like an impresario's cape.

I liked being adrift in symbols, beauty for beauty's sake.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

That's one of the great things about poetry one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

Contemporary poets got so obscure that poetry kind of fell out of favor,

As a consequence of Wittgenstein's philosophy, the questions once asked by philosophy have now passed into the realms of poetry. The way poetry is going, it looks as if they won't be asked much longer here either. We have learned to do without God, and it looks as if we will learn to do without philosophy. It will now, alas, join the ranks of subjects which are completed (and have become completely spurious), such as alchemy, astrology, platonic love, and stylitism.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation."

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

Poetry is a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language.

I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.

Skilled verse is the work of a profound skeptic.

To summarize a poem or put it into prose is quite simply to misunderstand the essence of an art.

J'ai toujours fait mes vers en m'observant les faire.

The long sobsOf the violinsOf autumnPierce my heartWith monotonous languor.

And all else is literature.