Poetry Quotes - Page 31

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

We always cut our poetical theories to suit our talent.

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

I guess the quality that makes one write poetry keeps one from selling it.

For poetry, more than any other art, except music, has a compelling hold upon the spiritual side of life.

We'd like to just write nothing but lyric poetry. The trouble is, the individual is going along intent on his own personal gratifications and love affairs and financial affairs and everything else. But loping alongside him is this fascist lout who keeps trying to take over. And if you keep ignoring him, he gets bigger and bigger, so every once in a while the free individual has to turn away from his private pursuits and give this fascist lout a few clouts, and beat him down to size.

Poetry is that which is lost in translation.

Thinking is always the stumbling stone to poetry.

Poetry and philosophy are, according to how you take them, different spheres, different forms, or factors of religion. Try to really combine both, and you will have nothing but religion.

Poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.

Poetry is to be found nowhere unless we carry it within us.

How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)

I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.

Give shape, artist! don't talk! Your poem be but a breath.

What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.

Poetry is the memory of language

We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.

Why speak of the use of poetry? Poetry is what uses us.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don't pay attention 'cause it probably has floated into somebody else's head.

I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.

The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision .. in Western poetry so much of the charged substance is previous poetry.

Poetry is talking on tiptoe.

In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.