Poetry Quotes - Page 13

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

Poetry is language trying to become bodily experience.

The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.

I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin -- a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Poetry to me is prayer.

I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.

I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

ZENITH / NOON beats out / on its solar anvil / the rays of light

Of all the trees that grow so fair Old England to adorn, Greater are none beneath the Sun Than Oak, and Ash and Thorn.

Just now I've taen the fit o' rhyme / My barmie noddle's working prime.

It is vain for the sober man to knock at poesy's door.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite impressions.

If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

The act of making poetry is an act of hope.