Poetry Quotes - Page 17

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend.

Poetry and code - and mathematics - make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader read three kinds of pattern at once; code moves the reader from a static to an active, interactive and looped domain; while algebraic topology allows us to read qualitative forms and their transformations.

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality.

Freedom is slavery some poets tell us. Enslave yourself to the right leader's truth, Christ's or Karl Marx', and it will set you free.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.

There are two ways of disliking poetry, one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

Creatures crawl in search of blood to terrorize your neighborhood. And whosoever shall be found without the soul for getting down, must stand and face the hounds of hell, and rot inside a corpse's shell.

One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

In a lethal world, poetry is necessary for survival.

Gently touching with the charm of poetry.

Kierkegaard was once asked, 'What is a poet?' He answered that a poet was an unhappy man whose moans and cries of anguish were transformed into ravishing music.

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

When power corrupts, poetry cleanses

Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.