Poetry Quotes - Page 31

• The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."

  Robert Penn Warren

  Want, Messages, Ends

  "The Themes of Robert Frost". Lecture, 1947.

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• There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

  John Ashbery

  Inspirational, Life, Army

  1989 In the International Herald Tribune, 2 Oct.

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• Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.

  Terence McKenna

  Inspirational, Life, Art

  Terence McKenna (1998). “True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival”, M J F Books

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• I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit...

  Edmund White

  Book, Thinking, Perfect

  "A Conversation with Edmond White By Edmond White". www.dalkeyarchive.com. 1996.

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• Poetry is the art of using language to transcend language.

  Laurence Overmire

  Art, Language, Poetry Is

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• Gel'fand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly. I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gel'fand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences!

  Dusa McDuff

  Math, Talking, Ideas

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• One merit of mathematics few will deny: it says more in fewer words than any other science. The formula, e^iπ = -1 expressed a world of thought, of truth, of poetry, and of the religious spirit "God eternally geometrizes."

  David Eugene Smith

  Religious, Truth, World

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• It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.

  Henry Beston

  Earth

  Henry Beston, Roger B. Swain (2001). “Herbs and the Earth”, p.4, David R. Godine Publisher

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• The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.

  James Gates Percival

  Air, World, Brightness

  James Gates Percival, Erasmus Darwin North (1859). “The poetical works of James Gates Percival”, p.1

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• I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.

  Edith Södergran

  Way

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• Thinking is always the stumbling stone to poetry.

  Khalil Gibran

  Life, Thinking, Stones

  Khalil Gibran “The New Frontier and Sand and Foam”, Library of Alexandria

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• It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Imagination, Soul, Common

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• Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Lying, Guests

  "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" l. 42 (1940)

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• We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life-to rested language or language under surveillance-to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Believe, Psychics, Weight

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• The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

  Gerald Brenan

  Race, Literature, Language

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• Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, and all flock to their aid.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Hope, Learning, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1136, Delphi Classics

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• Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Song, Learning, Men

  'Julian and Maddalo' (1818) l. 544

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• No matter how much we learn, there is always more knowledge to be gained. In this connection I am reminded of a short poem that has been in my mind over the years. It reads as follow: I used to think I knew I knew. But now I must confess. The more I know I know I know I know I know the less.

  A. Ray Olpin

  Learning, Thinking, Years

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• Starry Starry night
  Paint your palette blue and gray
  Look out on a summer's day
  With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
  Shadows on the hills
  Sketch the trees and the daffodils
  Catch the breeze and the winter chills
  In colors on the snowy linen land.

  Don McLean

  Summer, Song, Eye

  Song: Vincent

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• They swayed about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus.

  John Keats

  Horse, Pegasus, Rocking Horses

  'Sleep and Poetry' (1817) l. 186

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• Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Truth, Philosophy, Particles

  "The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861".

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• Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public

  Paulo Coelho

  Art, Writing, Naked

  FaceBook post by Paulo Coelho from Jul 09, 2011

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• Poetry is the outcome of emotions recollected in tranquility.

  William Wordsworth

  Outcomes, Emotion, Tranquility

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• For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.

  Robert Frost

  Art, Writing, Delight

  "The Figure a Poem Makes" by Robert Frost, 1939.

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• Ornate rhetorick taught out of the rule of Plato.... To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.

  John Milton

  Plato, Simple, Simplicity

  'Of Education' (1644)

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