On Poetry Quotes

Zen Makes use, to a great extent, of poetical expressions; Zen is wedded to poetry.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

If you choose your subject selectively - intuitively - the camera can write poetry.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

While gazing at myself from yourself, I was beautiful.

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

Poetry must be as new as foam & old as rock.

Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I Did, till we lov'd?

I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty--and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.

It just happens to be that people like to associate poetry and rap music. I think that idea is kind of corny.

You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.

If you show a poetry professor your shiny new multiple choice teaching technology, he will invite you to exit his office.

Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.

The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?

A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.

Writing poetry is a pleasure,...a pleasure out of hell

Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.

The journey back is always longer than the forward run.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.

In summer the empire of insects spreads.

The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace.

Lovers alone wear sunlight.

Every man needs his Siren To check his courage and strength When he hears her song In his travels through the unknown.

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women's hair rhapsodically described, women's faces acclaimed in odelike language.

Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen.

Poetry is the fiery index to the genius of the age.

Almost any poem has to be read twice, first for strangeness, second for clarity.

Poetry and philosophy will become friends.