Poetry Quotes - Page 18

• We need a safe place, a reserve of truth, a place where words kindle ideas and set ideas sparking off in others, a word sanctuary. Poetry is this gathering place of words.

  Allison Mackie

  Ideas, Gathering, Needs

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• I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

  John Ashbery

  Hammers, Hollow

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• Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

  John Dryden

  Dance, Ballet Class, Feet

  John Dryden (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of John Dryden (Illustrated)”, p.1562, Delphi Classics

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• Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

  W. S. Merwin

  Lost, Ends, Whole

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• To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

  Octavio Paz

  Eye, Ears, Reading Books

  Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.66, Arcade Publishing

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• If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Would Be, World, Hunger

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• Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

  Carl Sandburg

  Art, Children, Pregnancy

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• A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Art, May, Entertainment

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Time Enough for Love”, p.223, Penguin

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• The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

  Wallace Stevens

  Success, Intelligence

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Selected Poems”, p.184, Knopf

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• Writing poetry is a state of free float.

  Margaret Atwood

  Writing, States, Floats

  Margaret Atwood (2006). “Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood”

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• Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

  Robert Fitzgerald

  Elegance, Revelations, Poetry Is

  Robert Fitzgerald (1993). “The Third Kind of Knowledge: Memoirs & Selected Writings”, p.278, New Directions Publishing

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• I write poetry in order to live more fully.

  Judith Rodriguez

  Writing, Order

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• The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Spirit, Source, Completeness

  "Shadows and Miracles: Poems". Book by Cristina Necula (p. 7), 2007.

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• Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Communication, Writing, Voice

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

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• Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

  Georges Braque

  Art, Reality, Rays

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• Ocean waters..oceans deep..Serious poets never sleep.

  Sally-Ann Roberts

  Ocean, Sleep, Water

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• Poetry...the deepest abyss of infinity.

  Sally-Ann Roberts

  Infinity, Abyss

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• Literature is the question minus the answer.

  Roland Barthes

  Art, Healing, World Literature

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• If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wall, War, Taken

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.178, Xist Publishing

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• A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which it distorts.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Beautiful, Mirrors, Stories

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1840). “A defence of poetry. Essay on the literature, arts, and manners of the Athenians. Preface to the Banquet of Plato. The banquet”, p.33

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• Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Princess, Fairy Tale

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• If not then you must be trying to hear us and in such cases we cannot be heard. We remain in the darkness, unseen. In the center of unpeeled bananas, we exist. Uncolored by perception. Clothed to the naked eye. Five senses cannot sense the fact of our existence. And that's the only fact. In fact, there are no facts.

  Saul Williams

  Eye, Darkness, Perception

  Saul Williams (2006). “The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-Hop”, p.65, Simon and Schuster

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• The immediate success of the war poem anthologies ... proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse ... There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years.

  Edmund Gosse

  War, Years, Three

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• In the Augustan age ... poetry was ... the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature.

  Edith Sitwell

  Law, Age, Different

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• Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

  Philip Larkin

  Wordsworth, Deprivation, Daffodil

  Reply to question "Do you think people go around feeling they haven't got out of life what life has to offer?"- Required Writing (1983) p. 47

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