Quotes About Poetry

lady through whose profound and fragile lips the sweet small clumsy feet of April came into the ragged meadow of my soul.

it's spring and the goat-footed balloonMan whistles far and wee

E.E. Cummings

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we're not poets.

Querying greys between mouthed houses curl thirstily. Dead stars stink. dawn. Inane, the poetic carcass of a girl

I will touch you with my mind. Touch you and touch and touch until you give me suddenly a smile, shyly obscene; I will touch you with my mind. Touch you, that is all, lightly and you utterly will become with infinite care the poem which I did not write.

if you like my poems let them walk in the evening,a little behind you then people will say "Along this road i saw a princess pass on her way to meet her lover (it was toward nightfall) with tall and ignorant servants. — E.E. Cummings, "if you like my poems let them," Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems of E.E. Cummings . Liveright February 5, 2001) Originally published 1983.

Buffalo Bills defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what I want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death

though wish and world go down,one poem yet shall swim

lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry -the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids' flutter which says we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

haste ere some thrush with silver several tears complete the perfumed paraphrase of death)

Cummings had in mind creations of this sort when he said, 'The day of the spoken lyric is past. The poem which has at last taken its place does not sing itself; it builds itself, three-dimensionally, gradually, subtly, in the consciousness of the experiencer.

It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.

I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in. -A WOMAN PAINTED ON LEAF (In a Time of Violence)

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Æschylus was the poet of a new era. He bridged the tremendous gulf between the poetry of the beauty of the outside world and the poetry of the beauty of the pain of the world. He

PHOEBUS APOLLO The son of Zeus and Leto (Latona), born in the little island of Delos. He has been called "the most Greek of all the gods." He is a beautiful figure in Greek poetry, the master musician who delights Olympus as he plays on his golden lyre;

Tragedy belongs to the poets. Only they have "trod the sunlit heights and from life's dissonance struck one clear chord." None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry, and if poetry is true knowledge and the great poets guides safe to follow, this transmutation has arresting implications. Pain changed into

Can you not speak straight? Must everything be couched in that sinister poetry you affect? He seemed, for one second, taken aback, and then he let out a genuine laugh, oddly pure in contrast to his hoarse voice. His eyes lit up to the shade of a summer's day.

I even wrote a white-bear poem. It began Ghost bear wanders, always alone; king of the north, dispensing death from his traveling throne. It was shortly after this effort that I decided I wouldn't be a poet after all.

The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part.

She has been better educated than her sister, and has a more receptive mind. It seems as though someone had sown in a bare field a sprinkling of history, poetry, and pictures, and every seed had shot up in a flowery tangle.

What is originality in art? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not and this may be done by saying that it is never a willful rejection of what has been accepted as the necessary laws of various forms of art. Thus in reasoning originality relies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions. In poetry originality consists not in discarding the necessary laws of rhythm but in finding new rhythms within the limits of those laws.