On Poetry Quotes

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Poetry's object is truth.

Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.

Soho has got to be at its centre. It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers, all those things, and I think it should be valued as such, and protected as this centre for bohemia.

Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.

Poetry is mostly hunches.

The poet speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly... not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.

Any work that is not rooted in myth and poetry or that does not partake of the depth and essence of the universe is merely a ghost.

I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

One must write poetry in such as way that if one threw the poem in a window, the pane would break.

Where there are many beauties in a poem I shall not cavil at a few faults proceeding either from negligence or from the imperfection of our nature.

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems

If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

What can be explained is not poetry.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)

Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!

Dreams are our only geography—our native land.

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.

For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

No one here likes a wet dog.

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.

I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy.

In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings ... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.

In a notable family called Stein There were Gertrude, and Ep, and then Ein. Gert's writing was hazy, Ep's statues were crazy, And nobody understood Ein.

Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit.

The true spirit of delight...is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art

In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.

Poetry is the disease of the brain.

History is still in large measure poetry to me.

I think what we lack isn't science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.