Poetry Quotes - Page 29

Sad is his lot, who, once at least in his life, has not been a poet.

Poetry has been the guardian angel of humanity in all ages.

You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured.

I pulled a book by Robinson Jeffers off the shelf one day. It was powerfully moving. Tears ran down my face. That's when I became a poet.

Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.

Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.

A child playing with dolls may shed heartfelt tears when his bundle of rags and scraps becomes deathly ill and dies ... So we may come to an understanding of language as playing with dolls: in language, scraps of sound are used to make dolls and replace all the things in the world.

Poetry is our heart, our spirit, our soul. Call it whatever; without it, everything else is nothing but hardware.

Gotta get a tight grip, don't slip, loose lips, sank ships, it's a trip, I love the way she licks her lips.

Yea, marry, now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; before, it was neither rhyme nor reason.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.

Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.

Interfaces called transparent allow us to interact/do what we're supposed to do without being aware of how the effects are obtained. We should perhaps speak instead about their opacity, given that we cannot see through them to the machine.

Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.

A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.

Poetry is the Devil's wine.

The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such.