Mary Oliver Quotes About Poetry

Quotes about: Poetry

• 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.

  Mary Oliver

  Poetry, Way, Empty

• Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.

  Mary Oliver

  Moving, Fall, Voice

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

  Mary Oliver

  Ideas, Poetry, Feelings

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.108, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

  Mary Oliver

  Art, Mean, Poetry

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

  Mary Oliver

  Poetry, Adjectives, Verbs

• The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.

  Mary Oliver

  Spiritual, Poetry, Curiosity

  Mary Oliver (1995). “Blue Pastures”, Harcourt

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