Quotes About Art

Poetry is talking on tiptoe.

Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.

Writing poetry is a process of discovery...you can smell the poem before you see it....Like some animal.

Get rid of words and meaning, and there is still poetry.

Poetry relishes ripe fruit - but ripe is one thing and overripe quite another. That's something poetry doesn't like, so it couldn't care less if I were to fall overripe to the ground.

The works have to look like they're confident. But they also have to look sort of troubled. It's this weird thing: "Does that look confident and troubled?" It's a bit like difficult poetry.

My verse has brought me no roubles to spare: no craftsmen have made mahogany chairs for my house.

Poetry ... is the music and painting of the mind.

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

The poet is a pretender. / He pretends so completely, / that he even pretends that it is pain / the pain he really feels.

Poetry cannot take sides except with life.

The only people who have trouble with poetry are the people who link it with literature. It's much more akin to mountain-walking, and dancing by yourself at 2 A.M.

Poetry is such an ancient art, and I consider myself young within that art.

Whom the gods do not intend to destroy, they first make mad with poetry.

My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason.

Let your poem be kept nine years.

To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, To raise the genius, and to mend the heart

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

Music is not my life. My life is music.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.