Quotes About Interpretation

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

If language had been the creation not of poetry but of logic, we should only have one.

I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.

What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood?

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.

Poetry depends on being simultaneously opaque and transparent. It can't be only one or the other. The pebble and the pool.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend.

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.

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

I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.

Regarding R. H. Blyth: Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since he's a high-handed old poem himself, but he's also sublime - and who goes to poetry for safety anyway.

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

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he candivide.