On Poetry Quotes

The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.

Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.

Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?

We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.

We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor.

No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken, Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.

This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.

literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.

Books are carefully folded forests/void of autumn/bound from the sun

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.

Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects.

It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / Aha, my little dear, / I say, Your clan will pay me back one day.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

A hidden spark of the dream sleeps In the forest and waits In the celestial spheres of the brain.

Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.

The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.

What does infinity mean to you? Are you not infinity and yourself?

Poetry is the art of using language to transcend language.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

Nothing is part of everything.

Poetry is truth dwelling in beauty.

If emptiness is empty, how can something be borne or awaken from it?

Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue. If knowledge of mysteries come after emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

Be aware of the high notes, of the blissful faces and their soft messages, and listen for the silent message of a highly decorated gift.

Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

From whichever side I start, I think I am in an old place where others have been before me.

Heavenly bodies are nests of invisible birds.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems

Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry.

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.

Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.

The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.

I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.

These days, if you happen to be a poet you have to sing your words to get your ideas out.

Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.

I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.