Quotes About Interpretation

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

A lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.

A comic matter cannot be expressed in tragic verse. [Lat., Versibus exponi tragicis res comica non vult.]

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

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

The field of action of a photograph should be that chessboard of the heart and mind upon which poetry and art have always operated

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

No amount of virtuosic skill and choice of subject matter can be a substitute for depth and poetry.

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.

The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

Poetry is like painting: one piece takes your fancy if you stand close to it, another if you keep at some distance.

Mastery in poetry consists largely in the instinct for not ruining or smothering or tinkering with moments of vision.

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It's a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.