Quotes About Reflection

Why poetry, you ask? Because of life, I answer.

I believe in solitude broken like bread by poetry.

How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.

Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics

Solitude is an essential element of poetry.

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

Only poetry can address grief.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

Poetry is one of the most full ways of discovering what it feels like to be a human being in this particular moment, in this particular set of concerns. It's all about discovery.

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.

The heaven of poetry and romance still lies around us and within us.

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

Poetry, is the insulation that lies between the inner walls of the mind.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

That's the main business of the poem!-to see if you can't make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.

Poetry is on earth to make you serene, not corrupt your mind, thoughts,or emotions

Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.

Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.

I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.