Quotes by Poets - Page 422

Poetry is the whispering of a truth by the shouting of the best possible lies
Oscar Sparrow
Poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms, must be constantly exploring "the frontiers of the spirit." But these frontiers are not like the surveys of geographical explorers, conquered once for all and settled. The frontiers of the spirit are more like the jungle which, unless continuously kept under control, is always ready to encroach and eventually obliterate the cultivated area.
T.S Eliot
For the past thirty years or so, much American poetry has been marked by an earnestness that rejects the comic. This has nothing to do with seriousness. The comic can be very serious. The trouble with the earnest is that it seeks to be commended. It seeks to be praised for its intention more than for what it is saying.
Stephen Dobyns
How they are all about, these gentlemenIn chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced,Like night around their order's star and gemAnd growing ever darker, stony-faced,And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but proppedHigh by their bodice, one hand loosely dropped,Small like its collar, on the toy King-Charles:How they surround each one of these who stoppedTo read and contemplate the objects d'art,Of which some pieces still are theirs, not ours.Whit exquisite decorum they allow usA life of whose dimensions we seem sureAnd which they cannot grasp. They were aliveTo bloom, that is be fair; we, to mature,That is to be of darkness and to strive.
Rainer Maria Rilke
We are metered only by our own machines,while the book is a clock that forgets her machanics.
Amy King
Cut off from the land that bore us,Betrayed by the land we find,Where the brightest have gone before us,And the dullest are most behind - Stand, stand to your glasses, steady!'T is all we have left to prize:One cup to the dead already - Hurrah for the next that dies!
Bartholomew Dowling
Rather a thousand times the county jail than to lie under this marble figure with wings and this granite pedestal bearing the words "pro patria." What do they mean anyway?
Edgar Lee Masters
Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it,For that your self ye daily such doe see:But the trew fayre, that is the gentle wit,And vertuous mind, is much more praysd of me.For all the rest, how ever fayre it be,Shall turne to nought and loose that glorious hew:But onely that is permanent and freeFrom frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew.That is true beautie: that doth argue youTo be divine and borne of heavenly seed:Deriv'd from that fayre Spirit, from whom al trueAnd perfect beauty did at first proceed.He onely fayre, and what he fayre hath made,All other fayre lyke flowres untymely fade.
Edmund Spenser
Literature is news which stays news.
Ezra Pound
Onwetend van dit alles maakte ik eind vorige eeuw mijn entree in dit discours door aan een tijdschrift te vertellen dat poëzie volgens mij entertainment is. Als iemand dat platvloers vindt, voegde ik er behulpzaam aan toe, had hij volgens mij een te lage dunk van entertainment.
Ingmar Heytze
How hard it is, to be forced to the conclusion that people should be, nine tenths of the time, left alone! - When there is that in me that longs for absolute commitment. One of the poem-ideas I had was that one could respect only the people who knew that cups had to be washed up and put away after drinking, and knew that a Monday of work follows a Sunday in the water meadows, and that old age with its distorting-mirror memories follows youth and its raw pleasures, but that it's quite impossible to love such people, for what we want in love is release from our beliefs, not confirmation in them. That is where the 'courage of love' comes in - to have the courage to commit yourself to something you don't believe, because it is what - for the moment, anyway - thrills your by its audacity. (Some of the phrasing of this is odd, but it would make a good poem if it had any words...)
Philip Larkin
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.
A.R. Ammons
When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.
Dorothea Lasky
There is only beauty / and it has only one perfect expression / poetry. All the rest is a lie /except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.
Stéphane Mallarmé
A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.
Aberjhani
Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
Criss Jami
There is a master way with words which is not learned but is instead developed: a deaf man develops exceptional vision, a blind man exceptional hearing, a silent man, when given a piece of paper...
Criss Jami
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thoughtAs doth eternity...
John Keats
Two things consistently bring me pleasure: hot sweet tea and writing. Which is not to say that either are particularly good for me…I use entirely too much sugar and so far don’t find sucralose to be a good alternative. Also, writing is not a practice that engenders confidence. Quite the opposite. It’s about making yourself deliberately insecure so that you can write the next thing and have it be worth reading.And that’s not even taking into consideration the business end of things, which can make you bitter if you’re not careful…But I’ve spent my the bulk of my life to date figuring out the right mix of fat and sugar in my tea and also, how to get incrementally better (I hope…) at the writing, so I’m not giving it/them up!
Ariel Gordon
the bouquetBetween me and the worldyou are a bay, a sailthe faithful ends of a ropeyou are a fountain, a wind, a shrill childhood cry.Between me and the worldyou are a picture frame, a windowa field covered in wildflowersyou are a breath, a bed,a night that keeps the stars company.Between me and the world, you are a calendar, a compassa ray of light that slips through the gloomyou are a biographical sketch, a book marka preface that comes at the end.between me and the worldyou are a gauze curtain, a mista lamp shining in my dreamsyou are a bamboo flute, a song without wordsa closed eyelid carved in stone.Between me and the worldyou are a chasm, a poolan abyss plunging downyou are a balustrade, a walla shield’s eternal pattern.
Bei Dao
A little bunny or some kind of ferret was probablythere too, and bore witness as only rodents can.
John Ashbery
The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.
Philip Larkin
Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.
Philip Larkin
Demander à la poésie du sentimentalisme ... ce n'est pas ça. Des mots rayonnants, des mots de lumière ... avec un rythme et une musique, voilà ce que c'est, la poésie.
Théophile Gautier
They miss the whisper that runsany day in your mind,"Who are you really, wanderer?"--and the answer you have to giveno matter how dark and coldthe world around you is:"Maybe I'm a king.
William Stafford
The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry.
Aberjhani
How can love's spaciousnessbe conveyed in the narrowconfines of one syllable?
Diane Ackerman
The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of poetry have taken place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues- Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.
Charles Williams
No sword Of wrath her right arm whirl'd,But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word She shook the world.
Alfred Tennyson
Fragmentary BlueWhy make so much of fragmentary blueIn here and there a bird, or butterfly,Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--Though some savants make earth include the sky;And blue so far above us comes so high,It only gives our wish for blue a whet.
Robert Frost
The faster you go, the idler you get.
Ferreira Gullar
I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
Philip Larkin
Empty-page staring again tonight. It's maddening. I suppose people who don't write (like the Connollies) imagine anything that can be though can be expressed. Well, I don't know. I can't do it. It's this sort of thing that makes me belittle the whole business: what's the good of a 'talent' if you can't do it when you want to? What should we think of a woodcarver who couldn't woodcarver? or a pianist who couldn't play the piano? Bah, likewise grrr.
Philip Larkin
I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
William Stafford
Jag föddes för att kränga rosor på de dödas avenyer
Charles Bukowski
Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
I walk through the old yellow sunlightto get to my kitchen tablethe poem about melying there with the booksin which I am listedamong the dead and future Dylans
Leonard Cohen
something genuine like a mark in a toilet, graced with guts and gutted with grace
E.E. Cummings
Listen. Outside this frame I can see light,heavy as pardon, reliable as granite.Help me. Help me drag it into the picture.
Jeanne Murray Walker
...prose unfolds in time; and time contains both obstacles and revelations. Prose develops, the way characters and situations do. It requires a flow. A poem is an instant, lightning across the sky. Prose is before the storm, the storm, after the storm.
Molly Peacock
if what is true brings us sorrow, / if what sorrow brings is truth
Robert Peake
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated Challengers of oblivion Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down, The square-limbed Roman letters Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly; For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun Die blind and blacken to the heart: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems.
Robinson Jeffers
We are all poets, really.
Walter Lowenfels
My earliest poems appear almost skeletal to me now - it seems I've learned to add meat, muscle and a nice suit of clothes.
Wanda Lea Brayton
Poets find their voices when they articulate the wishes of the dead, especially those slain as sacrificial talismans to a larger frame of existence.
Michael S. Harper
The world is as it used to be:“All nations striving strong to makeRed war yet redder. Mad as hattersThey do no more for Christés sakeThan you who are helpless in such matters.“That this is not the judgment-hourFor some of them’s a blessed thing,For if it were they’d have to scourHell’s floor for so much threatening....“Ha, ha. It will be warmer whenI blow the trumpet (if indeedI ever do; for you are men,And rest eternal sorely need).
Thomas Hardy
I don't understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!
Margarita Engle
And the testicles of the fathers hang down like old lace
Robert Penn Warren
I fain would follow love, if that could be; I needs must follow death, who calls for me; Call and I follow, I follow! let me die.
Alfred Tennyson
In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise
W.H. Auden
Next o'er his books his eyes began to roll,In pleasing memory of all he stole.
Alexander Pope
He said he'd hurt himself against a wall or had fallen down.But there was probably some other reason for the wounded, the bandaged shoulder.With a rather abrupt gesture, reaching for a shelf to bring down some photographs he wanted to look at, the bandage came came undone and a little blood ran.I did it up again, taking my time over the binding; he wasn't in pain and I liked looking at the blood. It was a thing of my love, that blood.When he left, I found, in front of his chair, a bloody rag, part of the dressing, a rag to be thrown straight into the garbage; and I put it to my lips and kept it there a long while- the blood of love against my lips.
Constantinos P. Cavafis
Please lift your snowy skies off my soul -Your diamond dreams slice through my veins
Else Lasker-Schüler
You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd you whom the windows observe shame keeps youFrom entering a church and confessing this morningYou read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloudThat's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapersThere are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteriesPortraits of great men and a thousand different headlines("Zone")
Guillaume Apollinaire
He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.
Seamus Heaney
The still watersWrap my lips,Eyes, nose and ears,A clearCellophane I cannot crack.
Sylvia Plath
Here the phenomenologist has nothing in common with the literary critic who, as has frequently been noted, judges a work that he could not create and, if we are to believe certain facile condemnations, would not want to create. A literary critic is a reader who is necessarily severe. By turning inside out like a glove an overworked complex that has become debased to the point of being part of the vocabulary of statesmen, we might say that the literary critic and the professor of rhetoric, who know-all and judge-all, readily go in for a simplex of superiority. As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader's pride mixed in with much enthusiasm.
Gaston Bachelard
Only--but this is rare--When a beloved hand is laid in ours,When, jaded with the rush and glareOf the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,When our world-deafen'd earIs by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.A man becomes aware of his life's flow,And hears its winding murmur; and he seesThe meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
Matthew Arnold
Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to seeMen not afraid of God afraid of me.
Alexander Pope
Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despairOf not being able to expressWith a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,The bleeding of my heart.
Fernando Pessoa