Poetry Quotes - Page 16

Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God

No one can threaten poetry. It's always been there, always will be. Humans need it to live: it has sustaining powers. How could we (anyone) get through adolescence without some form of song? Song is only a version of lyric poetry that is carried more by melody than by internal coherence and unity. but lyric and song - they are the same.

I love poetry and my country above all else in the world.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.

In the Augustan age ... poetry was ... the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature.

Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience--the recognitions or revelations--out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

The poet who speaks out of the deepest instincts of man will be heard. The poet who creates a myth beyond the power of man to realize is gagged at the peril of the group that binds him. He is the true revolutionary: he builds a new world.

A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.

We need a safe place, a reserve of truth, a place where words kindle ideas and set ideas sparking off in others, a word sanctuary. Poetry is this gathering place of words.

Though my verse but roam the air And murmur in the trees, You may discern a purpose there, As in music of the bees.

For what I have publish'd, I can only hope to be pardon'd; but for what I have burned, I deserve to be prais'd.

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

poetry is the breath and finer spirit of knowledge

[I]n every part of this eastern world, from Pekin to Damascus, the popular teachers of moral wisdom have immemorially been poets.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

The true poem rests between the words.

There's no difference between lyrics and poetry. Words are words. The only difference is the people who are in academic positions and call themselves poets and have an academic stance. They've got something to lose if they say it's all poetry; if there's not music to it, and you have to wear a certain kind of checkered shirt or something like that. It's all the same. Lyrics are lyrics, poetry is poetry, lyrics are poetry, and poetry is lyrics. They are interchangeable to me.

Out of the ruined lodge and forgotten mansion, bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houses that are dust, the poet calls up a palingenesis.