Poetry Quotes
Most popular poetry quotes
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
Many peptic ulcers and psychosomatic ailments are poems struggling to be born.
Science is the labor and handicraft of the mind; poetry can only be considered its recreation.
There was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
Through the poet we encounter reality.
Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.
Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it meant that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.
Only poets care about what happened to the snows of yesteryear.
For a man to become a poet he must be in love, or miserable.
You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
In the end, the poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life.
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
Inside every man there is a poet who died young.
When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Beneath the poetry of the texts, there is the actual poetry, without form and without text.
Somehow, poem-making and person-making is the same thing.
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I couldn't say.
A poem is a form of refrigeration that keeps language from going bad.
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets.
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. You will never have an idle hour.
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
Poetry...shows with a sudden intense clarity what is already there.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.
A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.
I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a poem and to be given away by a novel.
Writing a poem is like a short love affair, writing a short story like a long love affair, writing a novel like a marriage.
A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art.
A poem is a witness to man's knowledge of evil as well as good.
The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.
Every good poem, in fact, is a bridge built from the known, familiar side of life over into the unknown.
A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated, you carry it around with you, and it nourishes you when you need it.
For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.
The beginning of a poem is always a moment of tiny revelation, a new way of seeing something, which almost simultaneously attracts language to it.
A poem is language distilled into premium whiskey, no mix, no ice, no little paper umbrella.
Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now.
The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.
Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.
The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love.
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.
The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright or lust—the female spider or the queen bee whose embrace is death.
And in a way a poem is like a wine glass in which you can hold up a little bit of reality and taste it.
What are poems for? They are to console us with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.
A poem lies inert, like Sleeping Beauty, until we love it into life.
A poem is like a painting.
A poem needs nervous tension, like an arrow needs a bowstring.
I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree.
The poem comes in the form of a blessing—"like rapture breaking on the mind," as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable.
Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transference.
What are poems but words Set edgewise up like children's blocks To build a structure no one can inhabit.
In a poem, the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.
Touched by poetry, language is more fully language and at the same time is no longer language: it is a poem.
A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.
I often think of a poem as a door that opens into a room where I want to go.
A poem is a meteor.
A poem releases itself, secretes itself slowly, sometimes almost poisonously, into the mind of the reader.
A poem is never finished—it's always an accident that ends it.
The poem is, then, a little myth of man's capacity for making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.
Poetry is a kind of attentiveness that permits one both the organized adventure of the nomad and the armchair security of the bank teller, a way of dabbling without being a dilettante.
Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, God in the details, the only way to get from here to there.
Poetry is music written for the human voice.
Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.
There is a view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
Poetry is devil's wine.
In poetry, wonder is coupled with the joy of speech.
It is certainly true to say that we know little about the judgment of contemporary poetry except that it is highly soluble in time. There may be absolute external standards to judge the quality of petrol or detergent, but for art we have only the solitary communion of the individual with a particular work and its capacity to endure the acid test of time.
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
Poetry is life distilled.
For the creative impulses of men are always at war with their possessive impulses, and poetry, as we know, spring s from brooding on just those aspects of experience that most retard the swift advance of the acquisitive mind.
I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence—this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.
Poetry is a religion without hope.
My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.
Next time you feel the itch, let poetry help you scratch it.
Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
Poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
Poetry is the purest of the language arts. It's the tightest cage, and if you can get to sing in that cage it's really really wonderful.
As well as between tongue and teeth, poetry happens between the ears and behind the left nipple.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable.
Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.
Poetry's a mere drug, Sir.
Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds.
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.
It is a species of painting with words, in which the figures are happily conceived, ingeniously arranged, affectingly expressed, and recommended with all the warmth and harmony of coloring.
Poetry. A wire Probes chasms among us, and Touching, sparks a soul.
The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse.
Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
If people need to exercise the spirit as well as the body, then poetry is gymnastics for the soul.
Poetry is language in orbit.
A year or two ago...I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us.
Poetry, in the most comprehensive application of the term, I take to be the flower of any kind of experience, rooted in truth, and issuing forth into beauty.
Poetry . . . comes blood-warm straight out of the unconscious.
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
Poetry, I have insisted, is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul.
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry: on the other hand poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
The notion of expressing sentiments in short lines having similar sounds at the ends seems as remote as mangoes on thee moon.
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colors.
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind.
Poetry and eloquence are both alike expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard.
Poetry, "The Cinderella of the Arts."
Poetry is the original language of the gods.
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste.
Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language.
Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
In a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
Much of poetry is an anguished waiting.
One of the virtues of good poetry is the fact that it irritates the mediocre.
Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.
Breathe-in, experience, breathe-out, poetry.
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.
Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
Poetry to me is prayer.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Painting is silent poetry, poetry is eloquent painting.
All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart, and is, in Emerson's phrase, "a larger imbibing of the common heart."
It is as unseeing to ask what is the use of poetry as it would be to ask what is the use of religion.
It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.
Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
"Poetry Is a Kind of Unconscious Autobiography."
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
