Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.
Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.
You can't make poetry out of thought; poetry is passion. Linear thought must be seduced by wild mind, by the fires of ecstasy.
It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.
Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer made my mate.
Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
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.
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.
One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.
Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.
I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.
And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?
Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.
Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtle round your ruin'd shed?
You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.
[I]n every part of this eastern world, from Pekin to Damascus, the popular teachers of moral wisdom have immemorially been poets.
Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of SHAKSPEARE's wit. The men who lived with him became Poets, for the air was fame.
The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
Poetry is road maintenance for a fragmented world which seeks to be kept together. It's been an integral activity for a long time.
Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen.
I believe that if I should die, and you were to walk near my grave, from the very depths of the earth I would hear your footsteps.
The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.
Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.
Everyone of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal, pouring off every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.
They who in folly or mere greed Enslaved religion, markets, laws, Borrow our language now and bid Us to speak up in freedom's cause.
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.
I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin -- a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.
The poet speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly... not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar.
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
Poetic effect is the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures.
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.
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.
It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.
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.
Poetry is unfallen speech. Paradise knew no other, for no other would suffice to answer the need of those ecstatic days of innocence.
The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme.
Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.
If you want to understand poetry, You have to go to its origin, If you want to understand the poet, You have to go to the Poet's home.
Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men.
Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success.
Freedom is slavery some poets tell us. Enslave yourself to the right leader's truth, Christ's or Karl Marx', and it will set you free.
Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man, so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object ofart.