Poetry Quotes

The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.

All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

Poets arent very usefulBecause they aren't consumeful or produceful.

Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

When the rhythm and night ride, no heart can hide.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.

I want to be able to touch every part of our community with poetry.

I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

No matter how much we learn, there is always more knowledge to be gained. In this connection I am reminded of a short poem that has been in my mind over the years. It reads as follow: I used to think I knew I knew. But now I must confess. The more I know I know I know I know I know the less.

The only problem with Haiku is that you just get started and then

I hate French poetry. What measured glitter!

There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop.

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are nothing, they are not even babies. I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods. They will wonder if I was important.

You snipe so steady, you snub so snide, so rip and ready to diminish and deride.

A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.

And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares, that infest the day, Shall fold their tents like the Arabs, and silently steal away.

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.

Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind.

If you examine the highest poetry in the light of common sense, you can only say that it is rubbish; and in actual fact you cannot so examine it at all, because there is something in poetry which is not in the words themselves, which is not in the images suggested by the words 'O windy star blown sideways up the sky!' True poetry is itself a magic spell which is a key to the ineffable.

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.

Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.

the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes

Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat.

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.

I pulled a book by Robinson Jeffers off the shelf one day. It was powerfully moving. Tears ran down my face. That's when I became a poet.

In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, Snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, Long ago.

True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.

I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.

Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Wine is bottled poetry.

The truth is... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else.

Take 7 emcees put em in a line And add 7 more brothers who think they can rhyme It'll take 7 more before I go for mine And that's 21 emcees ate up at the same time.

Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem, it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry.

In my opinion, the trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments, which I have named the 'epic' one. It possesses nobility and grandeur to the highest degree; it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst. Directed by the will of the master, the trombones can chant like a choir of priests, threaten, utter gloomy sighs, a mournful lament, or a bright hymn of glory; they can break forth into awe-inspiring cries and awaken the dead or doom the living with their fearful voices.

Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.