Poetry Quotes
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Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
I can't understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience.
Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief - everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
My dream is that people will find a way back home, into their bodies, to connect with the earth, to connect with each other, to connect with the poor, to connect with the broken, to connect with the needy, to connect with people calling out all around us, to connect with the beauty, poetry, the wildness.
For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.
There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.
True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.
In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.
When I was nine, the teacher asked us to write a piece about our village fete. He read mine in class. I was encouraged and continued. I even wanted to write my memoirs at the age of ten. At twelve I wrote poetry, mostly about friendship - 'Ode to Friendship.' Then my class wanted to make a film, and one little boy suggested that I write the script.
Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.
Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.
I don't really have a bucket list, but if I did, one entry would be to dust off my college Russian and spend a big chunk of a year reading, or trying to read, 'War and Peace' as it was meant to be read, in Russian, with all that rumbly rocks-on-rocks poetry inherent to the language.
The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.
Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.
I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.
Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.
In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.
What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.
We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.
I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.
And at some point I would like to talk my publisher into doing an anthology of my poetry alongside some teen readers' poetry. It would be fun, and really wonderful to get their stuff out there.
For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!
Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.
I think many people love poetry who don't know they love it. People are sometimes afraid of poetry, or they've been introduced to poetry that doesn't speak to them.
Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don't. I'm not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.
When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.
There was a time when poetry often made its way to vinyl; take a deep dive, for example, into the beat poets' countercultural albums of the 1950s to '80s.
Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
I just discovered when I was, oh, 12 or 13, that I was very interested in language - and this showed itself as poetry. There was no looking back.
Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.
Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.
Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.
You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf.
There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.
When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.
Art history and Elizabethan poetry don't employ workers; the arduous and tedious application of business sciences such as computer programming and accounting does.
For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.
My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.
Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
There is a real formula to writing music, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. It's very formulaic. The subject matter that you can address in pop music is somewhat restricted. It just doesn't allow that same emotive quality that you can put into poetry.
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
I've hated poetry ever since I was at school. I include Shakespeare in that. I don't understand the obsession with him!
It just happens to be that people like to associate poetry and rap music. I think that idea is kind of corny.
I think rap music is rap music. I mean, are there heavy writing aspects of it? Absolutely. In a sense, is it poetry? Yeah. I've heard that so much, growing up in a house with poetry. But I think people like to use that as a shortcut for who's good and who's not. It's like the word 'lyrical' - 'lyrical' is the worst word in the entire world.
I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.
When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?
At the age of seventeen, I left school. I went to university, and I wrote my first attempts at poetry in a room in a flat at the edge of the city.
It is certainly true that writers take a stance at some variance from organized religion. This has not always been true. But since the romantic movement - and I'm referring now exclusively to poetry - the emphasis has been on the individual imagination defined against, rather than in terms of, any orthodoxy.
My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.
There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.
A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
The olive branch has been consecrated to peace, palm branches to victory, the laurel to conquest and poetry, the myrtle to love and pleasure, the cypress to mourning, and the willow to despondency.
In bohemian circles, we were very aware that poetry was missing from popular culture.
I think of myself as a poet. I grew up with poetic influences - what I know from my background is the bardic poetry, which came down through oral tradition.
I didn't know until later, but my uncle was quite a famous bohemian in Glasgow, and he played guitar. My father was a kind of a poetic bohemian, and he read me poetry.
In England, we'd leave school at 15 and go on to a college, and I went to further education in a town called Welling Garden City. I fully immersed myself in bohemia there, which included poetry and modern art, jazz, philosophy, social radicalism.
When I met Bob Dylan, I was definitely impressed. This guy had come from the American folk world, but he was very schooled in poetry, too. He'd studied the Beat poets, of course. I grew up in the British bohemian scene. Dylan grew up in the American bohemian scene. So I was very pleased to meet such a guy.
Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.
After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.
My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.
I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it.
I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
I was around in 1970, and now I am around in 2015 ... there is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of 'American Pie.'
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.
But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
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