Poetry Quotes - Page 28

Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

One merit of mathematics few will deny: it says more in fewer words than any other science. The formula, e^iπ = -1 expressed a world of thought, of truth, of poetry, and of the religious spirit "God eternally geometrizes."

In its use of words poetry is just the reverse of science. Very definite thoughts do occur, but not because the words are so chosen as logically to bar out all possibilities save one.

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

The true poet dreams being awake.

It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.

Madman drummers, bummers, Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat. In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat.

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.

How do you define a poet? It's very simple. Anyone declaring that he is a poet, is a poet.

The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?

If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets.

Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.

Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

Poetry cannot be explained, it must be lived.

POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines.