Quotes About Poetry

The works have to look like they're confident. But they also have to look sort of troubled. It's this weird thing: "Does that look confident and troubled?" It's a bit like difficult poetry.

Poetry does need a bit of ferocity. The only way to attend to the fractured world is to write a ferocious kind of music, to sing that volatility.

The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.

Poetry ... is the music and painting of the mind.

Poetry is the gate through which I enter the land of enchantment. Once inside the flaming wall, my limitations fall from me, and my spirit is free.

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

Poetry cannot take sides except with life.

Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold.

The only people who have trouble with poetry are the people who link it with literature. It's much more akin to mountain-walking, and dancing by yourself at 2 A.M.

The translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.

Poetry is such an ancient art, and I consider myself young within that art.

Poetry keeps longing alive.

My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason.

Let your poem be kept nine years.

Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.