Poetry Quotes - Page 25

The poetry is all in the anticipation, for there is none in reality.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.

A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.

There were poets before Homer.

The freedom of poetic license.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.

Life's full of loss, who knows the cost, living in the memory of the love that never was.

I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests.

Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter...the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were

Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.

Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.

The true poet is called to take in the splendor of the world and for that reason will always be inclined to praise rather than tofind fault.

A poet wants only one small stone on which to carve his life.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.