Poetry Quotes

My love for Neo-Tokyo is a bulbous massof post-human organic circuitry.Cyperpunk is my mother tongue.My love is a man-machine interface gun.

Why should I have been surprised?Hunters walk the forestwithout a sound.The hunter, strapped to his rifle,the fox on his feet of silk,the serpent on his empire of muscles—all move in a stillness,hungry, careful, intent.Just as the cancerentered the forest of my body,without a sound.

He wanted to tell the baby that Paris was like a poem in stone.

I have heard queens' swans, moved a man to cry,heard Bach played in the Metro on guitars.I have made love in Paris. Let me die.

Jennifer Reeser

The breath of Paris pushes at my shutters.From the Balcony

Jennifer Reeser

For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.

Garcilaso de la Vega

... yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood...

Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.

Harold Frederic

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

Emily Dickinson

Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s—all of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics—in practice—even if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas—they remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other’s grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don’t Ask, 'giving prizes to friends.

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

William H. Gass

why be bothered with other people's set-ups? it only leads to torture.

Bob Dylan

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer.

It ain't so easy writing about nothin

Speak without words. Know the weight of words

Prose lies its way to the truth

I'm in love with New York. It matches my mood. I'm not overwhelmed. It is the suitable scene for my ever ever heightened life. I love the proportions, the amplitude, the brilliance, the polish, the solidity. I look up at Radio City insolently and love it. It's all great, and Babylonian. Broadway at night. Cellophane. The newness. The vitality. True, it is only physical. But it's inspiring. Just bring your own contents, and you create a sparkle of the highest power. I'm not moved, not speechless. I stand straight, tough and I meet the impact. I feel the glow and the dancing in everything. The radio music in the taxis, scientific magic, which can all be used lyrically. That's my last word. Give New York to a poet. He can use it. It can be poetized. Or maybe that's mania of mine, to poetize. I live lightly, smoothly, actively, ears or eyes wide open, alert, oiled! I feel the glow and the dancing in every thing and the tempo is like that of my blood. I'm at once beyond, over and in New York, tasting it fully.

An art in which the artist by means of rhythm and great sincerity can convey to others the sentiment which he feels about life.

Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

Phyllis McGinley

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully.

Aristotle

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

To have great poets there must be great audiences too.

Poets aren't very useful because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the air.

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right.

Rudyard Kipling

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.

Maxwell Bodenheim

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

Most joyful let the Poet be it is through him that all men see.

William Ellery Channing

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Wallace Stevens

A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.

Randall Jarrell

Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Robert Penn Warren

When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.

T.S Eliot

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

No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

T.S Eliot

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose - words in their best order poetry - the best words in their best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Christopher Morley

Science is for those who learn poetry for those who know.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

George Santayana

Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The poet's mind is ... 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

Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.

William Butler Yeats

Poetry is a mug's game.

T.S Eliot

A poem begins with a lump in the throat a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

I was promised on a time To have reason for my rhyme From that time unto this season I received nor rhyme nor reason.

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.

A drainless shower of light is poesy 'tis the supreme of power 'tis might half slumb'ring on its own right arm.

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 and significance of the universe helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved the Inquisition might have let him alone.

In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Wallace Stevens

One of Wordsworth's Lake District neighbours remarked upon hearing of the poet's death "I suppose his son will carry on the business."

Anonymous

Poetry is not a profession it's a destiny.

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