Poetry Quotes - Page 26

• Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Notebook, Understanding, Inspire

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• Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love

  Leonard Cohen

  Burning, Olive Branches, Violin

  Song: Dance Me To The End Of Love, Album: Various Positions, 1984

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• Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.

  Oscar Wilde

  Love, Life, Best Friend

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.103, Wordsworth Editions

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• Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.

  T. S. Eliot

  Voice, Humans, Human Voice

  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l. 129 (1917)

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• Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

  John Keats

  Friendship, Summer, Running

  John Keats, Helen Vendler (1990). “Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard”, p.222, Harvard University Press

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• Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they're falling like they're falling in love with the ground.

  Andrea Gibson

  Inspirational, Falling In Love, Autumn

  Andrea Gibson (Poet) (2013). “Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns”, p.43, SCB Distributors

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• And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Stars, Desire, Spirit

  "Ulysses" l. 30 (1842)

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• For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Graduation, Future, Eye

  "Locksley Hall" l. 119 (1842)

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• How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Ordinary, Doe

  Joseph Campbell (2001). “Thou Art that: Transforming Religious Metaphor”, p.92, New World Library

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• But now, you are twain, you are cloven apart Flesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart.

  Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Heart, Flesh, My Heart

  Algernon Charles Swinburne (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated)”, p.145, Delphi Classics

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• grow old with me. the best is yet to be. the last of life for which the first was made.

  Robert Browning

  Love, Birthday, Anniversary

  "Rabbi Ben Ezra" l. 1 (1864)

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• That night when you kissed me, I left a poem in your mouth, and you can hear some of the lines every time you breathe out.

  Andrea Gibson

  Inspirational, Sexy, Night

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• Forests may be gorgeous but there is nothing more alive than a tree that learns how to grow in a cemetery.

  Andrea Gibson

  Inspirational, Tree, Alive

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• I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

  Seamus Heaney

  Darkness, Rhyme

  Seamus Heaney (2014). “Poems, 1965-1975”, p.40, Macmillan

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• If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Want, Annoying, Ifs

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2016). “Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile”, p.1762, Random House

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• Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

  Paul Valery

  Dance, Journey, Hiking

  Talk on BBC Radio, January 13, 1976.

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• Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying: And this same flower that smiles to day, Tomorrow will be dying.

  Robert Herrick

  Death, Time, Flower

  "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" l. 1 (1648)

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• For the crown of our life as it closes Is darkness, the fruit thereof dust; No thorns go as deep as a rose's, And love is more cruel than lust. Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives; And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives.

  Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Time, Love Is, Dust

  'Dolores' (1866) st. 20

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• Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
  Stains the white radiance of eternity.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Inspirational, Life, Time

  'Adonais' (1821) st. 52

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• Poetry lies its way to the truth.

  John Ciardi

  Lying, Way

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• For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Self, Understanding, Biographies

  1985 In the New York Times, 12 May.

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• But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.

  William Carlos Williams

  Art, Sensual, Employment

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• Poetry
  makes nothing happen.
  It survives
  in the valley of its saying.

  Maxine Kumin

  Valleys, Happens, Things Happen

  Maxine Kumin (2015). “The Pawnbroker's Daughter: A Memoir”, p.40, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually - that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too - but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Imagination, Feelings, Way

  "The Life of Poetry". Book by Muriel Rukeyser. Chapter One: "The Fear of Poetry", p. 8, 1949.

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• Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time.

  Christopher Fry

  Men, Heaven, Earth

  Time, New York, April 3, 1950.

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