Quotes About Poetry

Poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague - that's its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate - one has to fall back to poetry.

Poetry is the most informative of all of the arts because everything comes down to poetry. No matter what it is we are describing, ultimately we use either a metaphor; or we say "that's poetry in motion." You drink a glass of wine and say, "that's poetry in a bottle." Everything is poetry, so I think we come down to emotional information. And that's what poetry conveys.

Poetry, my dear friends, is a sacred incarnation of a smile. Poetry is a sigh that dries the tears. Poetry is a spirit who dwells in the soul, whose nourishment is the heart, whose wine is affection. Poetry that comes not in this form is a false messiah.

To different minds, poetry may present different phases. To me, the reverent faith of the people I lived among, and their faithful everyday living, was poetry; blossoms and trees and blue shies were poetry. God himself was poetry.

You'll find i-poetry, you'll find that you can download poetry, that you can stuff your i-pod with recorded poetry. So just to answer the question that way, I think that poetry is gonna catch up with that technology quite soon.

The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry.

If you examine the highest poetry in the light of common sense, you can only say that it is rubbish; and in actual fact you cannot so examine it at all, because there is something in poetry which is not in the words themselves, which is not in the images suggested by the words 'O windy star blown sideways up the sky!' True poetry is itself a magic spell which is a key to the ineffable.

I don't have a set schedule to work on poetry at any given time, at the same time every day, but I do try to work on poetry every day and I do find some time every day that I can with some exceptions to work on poetry.

When people decide to talk publicly about poetry as an art form and how it's received, they often get very abject about it: "Nobody reads poetry," and then a thousand people write back, "No, we read poetry." There's an abundance of this negative preaching to the choir, and it's very similar to the experience I'm having.

Poetry is like walking along a little, tiny, narrow ridge up on a precipice. You never know the next step, whether there's going to be a plunge. I think poetry is dangerous. There's nothing mild and predictable about poetry.

Dont teach my boy poetry, an English mother recently wrote the Provost of Harrow. Dont teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament. Well, perhaps she was rightbut if more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place to live on this Commencement Day of 1956.

There is something essential and necessary about the immediacy and democracy of poetry. If you look at the history of literature, poetry is the one enduring genre from Homer to Ashbery - no other literary form has lasted as long. The novel is only two or three hundred years old... And yes, it's mainstream if we look back, we often turn to poetry to encapsulate what was going on in a particular moment because it crystalizes the experience in a very condensed and meaningful way.

I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It's the discipline of preparedness.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

I'm a poetry-skipper myself. I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country - make it any other two persons. This doesn't mean that I hate poetry. I don't feel that strongly about it. It only means that those who wish to communicate with me by means of the written word must do so in prose.

I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.

Poetry is always in transformation. There are certain aspects of contemporary Italian poetry that are very preoccupied with politics and deconstruction and they don't deeply interest me. But that's the case in most cultures. We have our own Language Poetry, which doesn't interest me either.

I’m a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry’s poetry. It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

My erotic poetry is not poetry that uses vernacular words. It is a very erotic poetry, but I never use anything, for example, that is not in the dictionary. I don't like to be ugly, I seek out what is beautiful, and if my great search is for freedom and beauty, I can't be vulgar, ordinary.

The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor.

That’s what i love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff were your not sure what the poets talking about. You may have an idea, but you cant be sure. Not a hundred percent. Each word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings. Is it a stand-in ―a symbol for another idea? Does it fit into a larger, more hidden, metaphor? ...I hated poetry until someone showed me how to appreciate it. He told me to see poetry as a puzzle. Its up to the reader to decipher the code, or the words, based on everything they know about life and emotions.

As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

I've stood in long lines, in the rain and under the sun, just to buy a pack of butter or a box of paper napkins. I've seen mothers running after the corpses of their martyred sons, oblivious to whether their headscarves or their chadors or their stockings and shoes were slipping off or not. I won't say any more. In the light of all this, how did you expect my poetry to be joyful or, as in my recent poem, to speak of love? Even so, more than half of my poetry is joyful and these are the products of the moments when I've felt happy.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

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.

Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.

The perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfillments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun vowing.

I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.

The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

When I started to take literature and poetry classes, I just started to get inspired by these new incredible works of art that I had never seen or heard of before. I wrote a lot of bad high-school poetry, just like pretty much everyone did, I think, at some point. For me, the inspiration never really stopped.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

I think poetry will survive and I don't think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we're suffering and we don't really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.

Your lines, I maintain it, are poetry, and good poetry.... Friendship... had I been so blest as to have met with you in time, might have led me - God of love only knows where.

Every poet gets to choose what kind of community he or she serves with the poems, and it's true that there is a community for very difficult, challenging poetry. It's a community that's established itself over the last 80 years, that was originally, in effect, really started by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. They believed that poetry ought to contain learning, that it ought to rise upon all the learning that went before.

I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.

In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a model and that for Dante to write this great poem he needs someone to come before him and he turns to Virgil's text, especially book six where Aeneas goes down into the underworld. And for me, that's a model of the poet's relationship to previous poetry, to another poetry as calling out for guidance.

I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat; it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.

Poetry, in the entire course of its development, has always been trying to capture meanings and problems which are still obscure and dormant. Poetry tries to awaken them with a kiss, wherever they may be: in the air, in things, in human beings.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.