Poetry Quotes - Page 12

My ear is not working, my poetry ear. I can't write a line that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard.

A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.

We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life-to rested language or language under surveillance-to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.

the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

The way in which modern German poetry follows theories reminds me of pupils who, scolded by their teacher for their insubordination, justify themselves by saying that they invented new rules of propriety according to which they are quite well- behaved.

Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Poetry is the disease of the brain.

Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system.

The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.

The human creature is alone in his carapace. Poetry is a strong way out.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.

Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme-- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

I am convinced that the first lyric poem was written at night, and that the moon was witness to the event and that the event was witness to the moon. For me, the moon has always been the very embodiment of lyric poetry.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

I always thought that writing poetry was in itself a political act.