Quotes About Insight

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

There is no question that the language of "felt thought" must be quarried from our personal depths. Like the best gold, it does not lie on the surface.

She has something to say about what life is like-which is all we ask of poetry.

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.

I learned a world from each / one whom I loved

Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new

Before you ridicule, remember somebody on a railway platform who seems to be train spotting may actually be writing poetry.

If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.

In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction.

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

Now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.

Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

Poetry is the morning dream of great minds.

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.

The world is full of poetry as the earth is of pay-dirt; one only needs to know how to strike it.