“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”
Quotes about poetry
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Voices on poetry
“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”
More on poetry
“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
“For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.”
“To have great poets, there must be great audiences.”
“When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.”
“I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.”
“In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.”
“A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.”
“Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.”
“The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.”
“Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.”
“The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.”
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”
“Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.”
“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.”
“As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. 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.”
“When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.”
“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
“Every age has its own poetry in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”
“When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.”
“Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.”
“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.”