Quotes About Poetry

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

In Dogen's writing, the practical instruction, philosophy and poetry are together in one voice. People hear about his poetry, go to his work, and expect to find poetry, or they hear about his philosophy and expect to find philosophy. They look just for practical instruction and find poetry and philosophy. They can't make out the complexity of his writing, become frustrated and let him go.

Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.

Homosexuals are delicate and bad poetry is delicate and [Allen] Ginsberg turned the tables by making homosexual poetry strong poetry, almost manly poetry; but in the long run, the homo will remain the homo and not the poet.

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.

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.

Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.

What's important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That's what it means.

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Often poetry, especially the sort of poetry I write, is concerned with looking at the borders between the sensual and the spiritual and seeing them as divided, equivocal, that mystery somehow can break in to the ordinary. And we read poetry I think in part, to gain a sense of that intimacy with things that we can't understand that are unable to be understood but that buoy up our lives.

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day, or Warren's blackin' or Rowland's oil, or some o' them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.

For me, poetry has a strong link to my filmmaking. My films learn from my poetry. In poetry, you're free. You start in the corner and you don't know where it leads you. I have no message, I have nothing I want to tell, I just start and I see where it leads, and it's a big surprise and relief if it's good. That's the ideal state for filmmaking.

Political poetry is more profoundly emotional than any other-at least as much as love poetry-and cannot be forced because then it becomes vulgar and unacceptable. It is necessary first to pan though all other poetry in order to become a political poet.

I never intended to write poems, nor to be a photographer, nor to be a film-maker. I just took many, many pictures and I would put them in an album, and then some years later I decided to show them and suddenly I was called a photographer. Same thing with my poetry. They're notes that I'd written in a book and it may be considered poetry.

Aviation is poetry ... It's the finest kind of moving around, you know, just as poetry is the finest way of using words.

It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.

I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

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.

I was reading poetry to my girlfriends, and they were like, you're really good. You should go to some poetry readings or something. And I eventually went and got a, you know, somewhat of a name for myself and a little bit of a following.

Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness...and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.

While it is unlikely that poetry or art shall eliminate the reality of war in the twenty-first century, it is thrilling to know there remain individuals, and even entire communities, still willing to invest in art and poetry's own uniquely explosive contributions to the great, and small, dramas of human history.

I just think that limits the kinds of experiences that people can have with poetry. But, poetry will survive; I don't worry about that. But, I do think that it may save fewer souls if people can't pay attention.

You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry.

Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.

If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.

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

I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore.

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.

People get anxious about dividing sorts of poetry, say Confessionalism from political poetry. But Confessionalism is very much an expression of racial privilege and of class privilege. I don't think it's always a blind expression of these privileges but it does have its genesis in them, in the politics of them.

It is hard to compare cultures without overgeneralizing, but I think a lot of American poetry has an assertiveness - an upbeat quality - that's less typical of Canadian poetry. Of course there are poets in both countries to whom that generalization does not apply. Speaking broadly, I'd describe Canadians as being a bit more reserved than Americans. Not less opinionated - just less direct.

Poetry has in a way been my bridge to my acting career. I had so many questions about my life, so I took to poetry to express my questions. I had questions about politics, family relationships, and more.

Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

My poetry is not lyric. The epigrams are lyric because they come from my youthful period of lyricism, but my other poetry is not lyric.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry.'

we need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most hurt, most happy, most downcast, most jubilant. Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need. And the fact that it is an endangered species in our culture tells us that we are in deep trouble.

Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard ... All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy.

I also learned to tell a story. I think I learned from poetry how to time a story. Poetry's timing, beats and pauses. That white space on the page is as important as the black. The bottom of the page is blackout. It's performance.

Think it's so unfair when people think that you're not a "real artist" unless you're getting paid for it....I personally know so many poets that work a 9 to 5 in a cubicle and come home and write poetry. Their poetry is just as powerful and moving as anything that I've ever written, if not more.

Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.

Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

I wrote poetry for seven or eight years, maybe longer, before I could say I was a poet. If people asked, I'd say I wrote poetry; I wouldn't go further. I was in my mid- to late-thirties before I felt that I was a poet, which I think meant that I had begun to embody my poems in some way. I wasn't just a writer of them. Hard to say what, as a poet, my place in the world is. Some place probably between recognition and neglect.

The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.