Poetry famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Poetry ... is the music and painting of the mind.
-- Sonia Orwell -
All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, 'Something's wrong, let's change it for the better.'
-- Sonia Sanchez -
True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.
-- Sophie Swetchine -
Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
-- Stanley Kunitz -
Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
-- Stanley Kunitz -
Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.
-- Stephane Mallarme -
You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.
-- Stephane Mallarme -
Poetry and code - and mathematics - make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader read three kinds of pattern at once; code moves the reader from a static to an active, interactive and looped domain; while algebraic topology allows us to read qualitative forms and their transformations.
-- Stephanie Strickland -
Interfaces called transparent allow us to interact/do what we're supposed to do without being aware of how the effects are obtained. We should perhaps speak instead about their opacity, given that we cannot see through them to the machine.
-- Stephanie Strickland -
It is the role of the artistic coder to question the coding languages, both through self-reflection and by using them for unintended purposes. These coders introduce multiplicity where none existed and challenge definitions of intent for the entire environment of programming language, machine and system.
-- Stephanie Strickland -
To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical.
-- Stephen Burt -
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.
-- Stephen Burt -
In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.
-- Stephen Burt -
Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend.
-- Stephen Burt -
When a philosopher, scientist, or psychologist discusses the discrepancy between the actual and the ideal, he or she attempts to convince us with the tools of discursive thought ... An artist does it differently ... their primary approach is different, even though both groups, if you will, are investigating the actual, the ideal, and the discrepancy in between.
-- Stephen Dobyns -
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.
-- Stephen Dobyns -
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
-- Stephen Spender -
Memory exercised in a particular way is a natural gift of poetic genius. The poet above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense impressions which he has experienced and which he can relive again as though with all their original freshness.
-- Stephen Spender -
If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.
-- Stephen Spender -
When the rhythm and night ride, no heart can hide.
-- Steve Winwood -
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
-- Steven Wright -
Coleridge received the Person from Porlock And ever after called him a curse, Then why did he hurry to let him in? He could have hid in the house.
-- Stevie Smith -
If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.
-- Susan Howe -
when a poem says something that could not have been said in any other way, in music, prose, sculpture, movement or paint, then it is poetry.
-- Sybil Marshall -
A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.
-- T. E. Hulme -
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
-- T. S. Eliot -
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
-- T. S. Eliot -
The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
-- T. S. Eliot -
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
-- T. S. Eliot -
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-- T. S. Eliot -
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
-- T. S. Eliot -
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.
-- T. S. Eliot -
I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.
-- T. S. Eliot -
Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.
-- T. S. Eliot -
What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
-- T. S. Eliot -
It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-- T. S. Eliot -
The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system.
-- Ted Hughes -
Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.
-- Theodor Adorno -
You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
-- Theodore Roethke -
He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority. His very talents will be a hindrance to him.
-- Thomas B. Macaulay -
He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.
-- Thomas B. Macaulay -
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
-- Thomas Gray -
Yea, marry, now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; before, it was neither rhyme nor reason.
-- Thomas More -
They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn't matter; certainly, not to me.
-- Tom Glazer -
The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.
-- Tony Hoagland -
my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn't yet fallen off completely.
-- Tove Ditlevsen -
Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.
-- Tracy K. Smith -
I am looking for a poem that says Everything so I don't have to write anymore.
-- Tukaram -
A child playing with dolls may shed heartfelt tears when his bundle of rags and scraps becomes deathly ill and dies ... So we may come to an understanding of language as playing with dolls: in language, scraps of sound are used to make dolls and replace all the things in the world.
-- Velimir Khlebnikov -
poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.
-- Vernon Lee -
Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason.
-- Victor Hugo -
For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.
-- Victor Hugo -
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
-- Virginia Woolf -
My verse has brought me no roubles to spare: no craftsmen have made mahogany chairs for my house.
-- Vladimir Mayakovsky -
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
-- Voltaire -
A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.
-- W. H. Auden -
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
-- W. H. Auden -
What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?
-- W. H. Auden -
Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.
-- W. H. Auden -
You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
-- W. H. Auden -
With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse
-- W. H. Auden -
The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.
-- W. H. Auden -
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
-- W. S. Merwin -
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
-- W. Somerset Maugham -
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
-- Wallace Stevens -
Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
-- Wallace Stevens -
Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.
-- Wallace Stevens -
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
-- Wallace Stevens -
At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd
-- Walt Whitman -
Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.
-- Walter Pater -
That the mere matter of a poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter;Mthis is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.
-- Walter Pater -
That which moveth the heart most is the best poetry; it comes nearest unto God, the source of all power.
-- Walter Savage Landor -
The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it.
-- Wendy Cope -
Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich.
-- William Bolitho -
The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.
-- William Butler Yeats -
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
-- William Butler Yeats -
What can be explained is not poetry.
-- William Butler Yeats -
O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What's not for their applause, Being for a woman's sake.
-- William Butler Yeats -
I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay
-- William Butler Yeats -
I thought of rhyme alone, For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble And make the daylight sweet once more....
-- William Butler Yeats -
It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
-- William Carlos Williams -
The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue.
-- William Cowper -
I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.
-- William Empson -
The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.
-- William Empson -
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
-- William Hazlitt -
Poetry is when you talk to yourself.
-- William Hughes Mearns -
Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.
-- William Rounseville Alger -
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
-- William Wordsworth -
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
-- William Wordsworth -
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko -
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko -
Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.
-- Yevgeny Zamyatin