Quotes About Poetry

Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values

The productions of all arts are kinds of poetry and their craftsmen are all poets.

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

The field of action of a photograph should be that chessboard of the heart and mind upon which poetry and art have always operated

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

The cliche is dead poetry.

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements. Once you understand the grammar of yoga; you can write your poetry of movements.

I don't write poetry when I wish, I write when I can't, when my larynx is flooded and my throat is shut.

I have to submit to much in order to pacify the touchy tribe of poets.