Poetry Is Quotes - Page 25

• There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

  Phil Ochs

  Song, Mirrors, Musical

  "Phil Ochs in Concert". Live album by Phil Ochs (introduction to the song "The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo"), March 1966.

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• Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

  Ezra Pound

  Art, Real, Sculpture

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• A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Would Be, Literature, Definitions

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• Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Writing, Science, Fiction

  Interview with David Duncan, www.physics.emory.edu.

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• Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

  Horace Walpole

  Beautiful, Art, Way

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• Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.

  Felix Dennis

  Art, Leader, Form

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• Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.

  Camille Paglia

  Spiritual, Vision, Way

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• Poetry is something in-between the dream and its interpretation.

  Lou Andreas-Salomé

  Dream, Interpretation

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• The secret of poetry is never explained,— is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. 'T is as easy as breath. 'T is like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and none knows what it is.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Play, House

  "Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson".

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• Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people.

  Patti Smith

  Song, Communication, Writing

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• The essence of poetry is will and passion.

  William Hazlitt

  Passion, Essence

  William Hazlitt (1836). “Literary Remains of the Late William Hazlitt: With a Notice of His Life”, p.76

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• The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

  Ezra Pound

  Music, New Year, Taken

  ABC of Reading (1934) "Warning"

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• When you write a song it's sometimes in a desperate moment whn you can't really articulate it. What I love about lyrics is what T.S. Eliot said: 'Good poetry is felt before it is heard.' I'm a believer in that. It's those moments when you sit yourself down, and talk to yourself in the mirror.

  Marcus Mumford

  Song, Writing, Mirrors

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• Writing poetry is a pleasure,...a pleasure out of hell

  Kenneth Slessor

  Writing, Hell, Pleasure

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• The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn’t need to be read. You don’t have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don’t even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them. Here’s every word I spoke for a week. Here’s a year’s worth of weather reports... and without ever having to read these things, you understand them.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Book, Writing, Years

  "Against Expression: Kenneth Goldsmith in Conversation". Poets.org Interview, www.poets.org. February 19, 2011.

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• Poetry is always close kin to the impossible, isn't it?

  Reginald Shepherd

  Impossible

  Reginald Shepherd (2007). “Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry”

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• Mab Jones' poetry is suffused with a cool wit and a wisdom beyond her years. She is a superb performance poet in the tradition of Joolz Denby and Pam Ayres and, like them, her work is beautifully layered and contains bittersweet depths.

  Phill Jupitus

  Years, Depth, Bittersweet

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• Poetry is not a waiting room where one stays overnight...every word is war.

  Rolf Dieter Brinkmann

  War, Waiting Rooms, Waiting

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• I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing more natural, as in how it is lived in the person. We don’t separate thinking from feeling in real life, so why should we separate it in writing?

  Etel Adnan

  Philosophy, Real, Moving

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• Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

  John Drinkwater

  Communication, Way, Certain

  John Drinkwater (1922). “The Lyric: An Essay”, p.8, Library of Alexandria

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• Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

  Harold Bloom

  Art, Reading, Sublime

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.31, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Poetry is the essence of everything, and it’s through deep contact with reality and living fully that you reach poetry. Very often I see photographers cultivating the strangeness or awkwardness of a scene, thinking it is poetry. No. Poetry is two elements which are suddenly conflict — a spark between two elements. But it’s given very seldom, and you can’t look for it. It’s like if you look for inspiration. No, it just comes by enriching yourself and living.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Inspiration, Reality, Thinking

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• The specific excellence of verbal expression in poetry is to be clear without being low.

  Aristotle

  Expression, Excellence, Lows

  Aristotle, Gerald Frank Else (1970). “Poetics”, p.58, University of Michigan Press

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• Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  House, Palaces, Events

  'Table Talk' (1835) 9 May 1830

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• Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called other, which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Fiction, Limits, Fields

  Interview with David Duncan, www.physics.emory.edu.

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