On Poetry Quotes

Poetry and painting are rooted in the same law, The work of heaven and of the first cause.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

In scientific thinking are always present elements of poetry. Science and music requires a thought homogeneous.

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

To hide feelings when you are near crying is the secret of dignity.

Every evening words, not stars, light the sky. No rest in life like life itself.

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

To accomplish the perfect perfection, a little imperfection helps.

The world is a navy in an empty ocean.

Where music thundered let the mind be still, Where the will triumphed let there be no will, What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.

But far more numerous was the herd of such, Who think too little, and who talk too much.

Not in the clamor of the crowded street, Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.

I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Digressions are part of harmony, deviations too.

An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.

Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form: Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, And soars and shines, another and the same.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

There is nothing like scrubbing toilets for a living to make you question the choices you have made in life.

I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.

Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.

How alive is thought, invisible, yet without thought there is no sight.

Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.

Life is a poem most people never read.

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

History will be erased in the universal purgatory.

Pose your questions to people and you will get countless useless answers.

Even ivory towers need central heating.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

With its leaves so rich and heavy with elation and its crimson face made brighter with visions of divinity the shadow of a certain rose looks just like an angel eating light.

Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.

September 11, 2001: Citizens of the U.S., besieged by terror’s sting, rose up, weeping glory, as if on eagles’ wings.--from the poem Angel of Remembrance: Candles for September 11, 2001

The most complicated skill is to be simple.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

Possible is more a matter of attitude, A matter of decision, to choose Among the impossible possibilities, When one sound opportunity Becomes a possible solution.

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

Poetry is fact given over to imagery.