Quotes About Perception

I think poetry involves heightened noticing or imagining as well as creating a certain made shape. On the other hand, that shape can be made just by pointing at something and saying, "That's a poem".

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

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

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

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.

Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.

poetry ... shows with a sudden intense clarity what is already there.

Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.

Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

And a lot of poetry is putting yourself back into the state of wonder that you have before things when you're a child. It's not only a joyous wonder, it's sometimes a grief stricken wonder.

Don't you think that as a people, Americans have less poetry, real poetry, in their souls than any other nations?

You put yourself in the receptive frame of mind with which we approach music or poetry, which you can measure the difference on a neurological scanner.

For though, in nature, depth and height Are equally held infinite: In poetry, the height we know; 'Tis only infinite below.

Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.

Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

You should check out William Shatner's album The Transformed Man. It will alter the way you hear poetry forever. And not in a good way.

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

Profound thoughts and profound experiences get revealed to be tricks that we play on ourselves, and poetry gets revealed to be just, like, some dumb words that somebody put in an interesting order.

Poetry comes out of an elite experience, the experience of people whose ears are opened to the song of the universe.

Poetry makes sense of the parts of human experience that are confusing and not decodable in any other way. It makes accessible the inaccessible.

No one ever expects poetry to sell...

Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.