Quotes About Interpretation

Poetry is the fiery index to the genius of the age.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

The wheat field has ...poetry; it is like a memory of something one has once seen. We can only make our pictures speak.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

They see poetry in what I have done. No. I apply my methods, and that is all there is to it.

Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

Poetry is not a code to be broken but a way of seeing with the eyes shut.

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.

There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

What can be explained is not poetry.

A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.

History is still in large measure poetry to me.

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.

Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system.

If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.

Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

Poetry is an extra hand. It can caress or tickle. It can clench and fight.

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.