Quotes About Poetry

History is still in large measure poetry to me.

Perfume is a story in odors, sometimes a poetry of memory

My ear is not working, my poetry ear. I can't write a line that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard.

I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.

the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy.

I myself have never called what I write anti-poetry. I also think that my poetry should not be only known as the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal but rather as Nicaraguan poetry.

Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.

In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.

Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings ... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.

I feel the written word, poetry and literature is just one of the most beautiful things that human beings do. So we have to fight for it.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.

Poetry is language trying to become bodily experience.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin -- a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.