Quotes About Poetry

Oh phosphorescence. Now there's a word to lift your hat to... To find that phosphorescence, that light within — is the genius behind poetry.

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]

E=mc2 is even better than the best poetry: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

have wanted to fight so well that I will be immortalized in poetry and song. I have wanted to fight so well that an epic poet will come along and create a poem about me that will be sung forever. That way, I will have undying kleos. People will remember my name after I am dead. I will have reputation and fame. I want to be remembered after my death. I want my name to live on after I die. I want to be remembered as a great warrior who slaughtered many other warriors.

I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.

I wouldn't be surprised if poetry - poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs - is how the world works. The world isn't logical; it's a song.

And there are even more unusual cases in poetry, where the observation that parentheses include content of secondary importance needs to be turned on its head. In a poem, what is within the parentheses is always significant -- often more so than in the surrounding text.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?

Still, most testimonies focus on creativity as a form of defiance—the dogged fortitude with which many attempt to pursue art, or music, or writing, or poetry, serves as an antidote to the pointlessness of their "real" paid work.

One thing has led to the next in my life, but like lines of a poem. I suppose I've thrown in my lot with love, and don't know any other way to go on breathing.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

Tu Fu's wandering through the thousands of miles of ancestor peaks was always the Tao/Cosmos open to itself- ancestor wandering itself and gazing into itself; thinking itself and feeling itself, lamenting itself, and celebrating itself, writing poems about itself.

Standing Alone Empty skies. And beyond, one hawk. Between river banks, two white gulls Laze, wind-drifted. Fit for an easy kill, To and fro, they follow contentment. Grasses all frost-singed. Spiderwebs Still hung. Heaven's loom of origins Tangling our human ways too, I stand Facing sorrow's ten thousand sources. Tu Fu

8th Moon, 17th Night: Facing the Moon The autumn moon is still round tonight. In this river village, isolate old wanderer Hoisting blinds, I return to its brilliance, And propped on a cane, follow it further: Radiance rousing hidden dragons, bright Scatters of birds aflutter. Thatched study Incandescent, I trust to this orange grove Ablaze: clear dew aching with fresh light. Tu Fu

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow low our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy (Hume, 1739, p. 153).

Todas as cores da poesia, apesar de esplêndidas, nunca podem pintar os objetos naturais de tal modo que se torne a descrição pela paisagem real. O pensamento mais vivo é sempre inferior à sensação mais embaçada.

Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.

Browning, whose verse is famously obscure, was once approached by a woman who asked the meaning of a particular stanza. "Madame," he answered, "when I wrote that only God and I knew what it meant. Now, only God knows.

For him, poetry was an inverted form of sympathetic magic: what it tries to preserve disappears, — David Jauss, from section 6 of "The Wandering Between Worlds," Black Warrior Review (vol. 23, no. 1, Fall/Winter 1996)

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

Soldiers falling fast Battle of white and scarlet Blossoms on the ground