Poetry Quotes - Page 40

• Baby, I have no idea how this will end. Maybe the equator will fall like a hula hoop from the earth's hips and our mouths will freeze mid-kiss on our 80th anniversary or maybe tomorrow my absolute insanity combined with the absolute obstacle course of your communication skills will leave us like a love letter in a landfill. But whatever, however, whenever this ends I want you to know that right now, I love you forever.

  Andrea Gibson

  Inspirational, Baby, Fall

  66 Copy quote

• This is my heartbeat like yours, it is a hatchet It can build a house or tear one down.

  Andrea Gibson

  Inspirational, House, Tears

  Twitter post from Oct 22, 2010

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue.

  William Cowper

  Art, Passion, Sides

  4 Copy quote

• That which moveth the heart most is the best poetry; it comes nearest unto God, the source of all power.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Heart, Source, Best Poetry

  Walter Savage Landor (1834). “Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare, Euseby Treen, Joseph Carnaby and Silas Gough, Clerk: Before the Worshipful Sir Thomas Lucy, Knight, Touching Deer-stealing on the 19th Day of September in the Year of Grace 1582, Now First Published from Original Papers”, p.177

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My 'must-have' was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me.

  Lucy Larcom

  Atmosphere, May, Firsts

  Lucy Larcom (1961). “A New England girlhood”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.

  Amy Lowell

  Writing, Creating, Agony

  8 Copy quote

• I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.

  Amy Lowell

  Writing, Arriving, Deny

  4 Copy quote

• Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

  Amy Lowell

  Powerful, Literature, Way

  Amy Lowell (1931). “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry”, p.79, Ardent Media

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

  Adrienne Rich

  Thinking, Health Education, Shelter

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.11, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

  Adrienne Rich

  Believe, Trying, World

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.137, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

  Diane Ackerman

  Memorable, Language, Human Nature

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “Deep Play”, p.129, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• poetry had everything to teach me about life.

  Diane Ackerman

  Teach

  7 Copy quote

• Lyrical poetry is much the same an every age, as the songs of the nightingales in every spring-time.

  Heinrich Heine

  Song, Spring, Age

  Heinrich Heine (1888). “Wit, Wisdom, and Pathos”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong,
  And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song.

  John Keats

  Song, Sweet, Brotherhood

  'To George Felton Mathew' (1817) l. 1

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.

  Margaret Atwood

  Truth, Doors, Seems

  Margaret Atwood (1984). “Second words: selected critical prose”, Beacon Press, 1984

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• poetry is where the language is renewed.

  Margaret Atwood

  Language, Poetry Is

  4 Copy quote

• For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.

  Robin Morgan

  Breathing, Way, World

  Robin Morgan (2014). “Saturday's Child: A Memoir”, p.375, Open Road Media

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.

  Edmund Burke

  Art, Powerful, Passion

  Edmund Burke (1999). “The Portable Edmund Burke”, p.93, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading. But the thinking will come afterwards.

  Sara Teasdale

  Reading, Thinking, Flames

  4 Copy quote

• My theory is that poems are written because of a state of emotional irritation. It may be present for some time before the poet is conscious of what is tormenting him. The emotional irritation springs, probably, from subconscious combinations of partly forgotten thoughts and feelings. Coming together, like electrical currents in a thunder storm, they produce a poem. ... the poem is written to free the poet from an emotional burden.

  Sara Teasdale

  Spring, Emotional, Irritation

  Sara Teasdale, William Drake (1984). “Mirror of the Heart: Poems of Sara Teasdale”, MacMillan Publishing Company

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.

  Anne Sexton

  Book, Mean, Long

  7 Copy quote

• Poetry to me is prayer.

  Anne Sexton

  Prayer

  12 Copy quote

• It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.

  Anne Sexton

  Believe, Writing, Self

  15 Copy quote

• Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.

  John Ruskin

  Saws, Speak, Milton

  4 Copy quote

• Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

  Mary Oliver

  Adjectives, Verbs, Looks

  6 Copy quote