Quotes About Poetry

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)

Poets are simply those who have made a profession ans a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.

CAMPBELL: All poets. Poetry is a metaphorical language. MOYERS: A metaphor suggests potential. CAMPBELL: Yes, but it also suggests the actuality that hides behind the visible aspect. The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced.

People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all—she's the muse. She's the inspirer of poetry. She's the inspirer of the spirit. So, she has three functions: one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization.

CAMPBELL: I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky.

CAMPBELL: Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. Most

Never has been a LONG hortatory poem', Pound advised John Hargrave, the leader of the Green Shirts, a militant wing of Social Credit: 'Epic…is not incitement to IMMEDIATE act/ you tell the tale to direct the auditor toward admiration of certain nobilities, courage etc.' Or, putting it another way, this time to Basil Bunting as a fellow poet, 'The poet's job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice.

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

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…. The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.

And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man.

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.

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

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

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words ' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Emerson lectured and wrote treaties and essays, and masses of clotted, cabbagey poetry. Reading him is like trying to hack your way through a swamp of creeping verbiage.

But it isn't easy,' said Pooh. 'Because Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.

They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come.