967 Poetry Quotes

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

How many voices have escaped you until now, the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot, the steady accusations of the clock numbering the minutes no one will mark. The terrible clarity this moment brings, the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.

Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.

In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension.

Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

There is no longer beauty except in the struggle. No more masterpieces without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault against the unknown forces in order to overcome them and prostrate them before men.

The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

The song seraphically free Of taint of personality, So pure that it salutes the suns The voice of one for millions, In whom the millions rejoice For giving their one spirit voice.

Near the lake where drooped the willow, Long time ago!

I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me.

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.

Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.

I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.

When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Poetry is life distilled.

The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope.

The soul of man is larger than the sky, Deeper than ocean, or the abysmal dark Of the unfathomed center.

Her very frowns are fairer far Than smiles of other maidens are.

Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.

As I came down the Highgate Hill, The Highgate Hill, the Highgate Hill, As I came down the Highgate Hill I met the sun's bravado, And saw below me, fold on fold, Grey to pearl and pearl to gold, This London like a land of old, The land of Eldorado.

The tree looks like a dog, barking at heaven.

Le Poete est semblable au prince des nuees Qui hante la tempete et se rit de l'archer ; Exile sur le sol au milieu des huees, Ses ailes de geant l'empechent de marcher.

Un soir, l'ame du vin chantait dans les bouteilles: 'Homme, vers toi je pousse, o cher desherite, Sous ma prison de verre et mes cires vermeilles.'

'En toi je tomberai, vegetale ambroisie, Grain precieux jete par l'eternel Semeur, Pour que de notre amour naisse la poesie Qui jaillira vers Dieu comme une rare fleur!'

Gloire et louange a toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs Du Ciel, ou tu regnas, et dans les profondeurs de l'Enfer, ou, vaincu, tu reves en silence! Fais que mon ame un jour, sous l'Arbre de Science, Pres de toi se repose, a l'heure ou sur ton front Comme un Temple nouveau ses rameaux s'epandront!

Quelle est cette ile triste et noire? - C'est Cythere, Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garcons. Regardez, apres tout, c'est une pauvre terre.

C'est a la fois par la poesie et a travers la poesie, par et a travers la musique, que l'ame entrevoit les splendeurs situees derriere le tombeau; et, quand un poeme exquis amene les larmes au bord des yeux, ces larmes ne sont pas la preuve d'un exces de jouissance, elles sont bien plutot le temoignage d'une melancolie irritee, d'une postulation des nerfs, d'une nature exilee dans l'imparfait et qui voudrait s'emparer immediatement, sur cette terre meme, d'un paradis revele.

Tous les grands poetes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques.

Poe with a cross, that's what you are, adored of the gangster age.

The poet, says Baudelaire, is a decipherer, a Kabbalist of reality, a decoder. Ordinary life, if it is not a message in code, a system of symbols for something else, is unacceptable. It must be a cryptogram; it can't be what it seems. The poet's task is to decode the incomprehensible obvious. His life becomes a deliberately constructed paranoia, as Rimbaud, Breton, Artaud were to say generations later. As we read him, we discover that Baudelaire believes in the charm, the incantation, the cryptogram, but he ceases to believe in the secret. The spirits have not risen. The code says nothing. This is the mystery concealed by the disorder of the world. The visionary experience ends in itself; the light of the illuminated comes only from and falls only on himself.

There, in the high bright window he dreams, and sees What we are blind to,-we who mass and crowd From wall to wall in the darkening of a cloud.

Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain! I am dissolved and woven again... Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me. Thousands of voices weave in the rain.

What was this dream we had, a dream of music, Music that rose from the opening earth like magic And shook its beauty upon us and died away? The long cold streets extend once more before us. The red sun drops, the walls grow grey.

The poet walked alone in a cold late rain, And thought his grief was like the crying of sea-birds; For his lover was dead, he never would love again.

Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass, Through many doors to the one door of all. Soon as it's opened we shall hear a music: Or see a skeleton fall . . .

Cavafy's attitude toward the poetic vocation is an aristocratic one. His poets do not think of themselves as persons of great public importance and entitled to universal homage, but, rather, as citizens of a small republic in which one is judged by one's peers and the standard of judgment is strict.

Nid ydyw Duw mor greulon Ag y dywaid hen ddynion. Ni chyll Duw enaid gwr mwyn, Er caru gwraig na morwyn. Tripheth a gerir drwy'r byd: Gwraig a hinon ac iechyd. Merch sydd decaf blodeuyn Yn y nef ond Duw ei hun.

Cyn rheitied i mi brydu Ag i tithau bregethu, A chyn iawned ym glera Ag I tithau gardota. Pand englynion ac odlau Yw'r hymnau a'r segwensiau? A chywyddau i Dduw lwyd Yw sallwyr Dafydd Broffwyd.

Plygain y darllain deirllith, Plu yw ei gasul i'n plith. Pell y clywir uwch tiroedd Ei lef o lwyn a'i loyw floedd. Proffwyd rhiw, praff awdur hoed, Pencerdd gloyw angerdd glyngoed.

Lleuad las gron gwmpas graen, Llawn o hud, llun ehedfaen; Hadlyd liw, hudol o dlws, Hudolion a'i hadeilws; Breuddwyd o'r modd ebrwydda', Bradwr oer a brawd i'r ia. Ffalstaf, gwir ddifwynaf gwas, Fflam fo'r drych mingam meingas!

Harddwas teg a'm anrhegai, Hylaw wr mawr hael yw'r Mai. Anfones ym iawn fwnai, Glas defyll glan mwyngyll Mai. Ffloringod brig ni'm digiai, Fflwr-dy-lis gyfoeth mis Mai.

Hawddamor, glwysgor glasgoed, Fis Mai haf, canys mau hoed. Cadarn farchog serchog sal, Cadwynwyrdd feistr coed anial; Cyfaill cariad ac adar, Cof y serchogion a'u car; Cennad nawugain cynnadl, Caredig urddedig ddadl.

Digrif fu, fun, un ennyd Dwyn dan un bedwlwyn ein byd. Cydlwynach , difyrrach fu, Coed olochwyd, cydlechu, Cydfyhwman marian mor, Cydaros mewn coed oror, Cydblannu bedw, gwaith dedwydd, Cydblethu gweddeiddblu gwydd. Cydadrodd serch a'r ferch fain, Cydedrych caeau didrain.

Yr wylan deg ar lanw dioer Unlliw ag eiry neu wenlloer, Dilwch yw dy degwch di, Darn fel haul, dyrnfol, heli.

Yr wybrwynt helynt hylaw Agwrdd drwst a gerdda draw, Gwr eres wyd garw ei sain, Drud byd heb droed heb adain.

Nythod ddwyn, cyd nithud ddail, Ni'th dditia neb, ni'th etail, Na llu rhugl, na llaw rhaglaw, Na llafn glas na llif na glaw.

Yet Dafydd's humour does not obscure, any more than Chaucer's does, the underlying seriousness of his poetry. Behind his poems of requited and unrequited love, whether idyllic or idealizing, whether streaked by savage jealousy or a profound feeling of betrayal reminiscent of Troilus and Criseyde, there runs a sense of the cruel impermanence of the world.

The engines that have driven poetry's institutional success - the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university - have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.

Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around - not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.

Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets' work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author's ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.

As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions. Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.

Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it - be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters.

Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future.

Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.

Poetry is not a branch of analytical philosophy. It is a primal, holistic kind of human communication. A poet needs innocence as much as knowledge, emotion as much as intelligence, vulnerability as much as rigor. A poet can become too smart for his or her own good and forget the childlike pleasures of sound and story, sense, and sensuality that poetry should provide. The challenge for a writer is to master the medium of poetry without losing that inner innocence.

Poetry is an art form that demands heightened attention and retention. It both invites and rewards more intense involvement than we normally give to other kinds of speech. Poetic technique, therefore, is never esoteric but eminently practical. It serves at least two purposes. First, it announces that a poem differs from other kinds of speech, that it requires the audience's special attention. A poem begins by attracting our attention through its sound, shape, typography, syntax, texture, or tone. Second, the technique maintains the audience's involvement. All poetic form is a way of keeping the audience's attention beyond what ordinary language requires. Meter, for example, creates a gentle trance state in the auditor. Since poetry is more intense, condensed, and expressive than ordinary language, it needs these techniques to carry the burden of its message.

And the souls mounting up to God Went by her like thin flames.

I love them for finding what I can't find, and for loving me for the line I wrote, and for forgetting it so that a thousand times, till death finds them, they may discover it again, in other lines in other happenings. And for wanting to know it, for assuming there is such a secret, yes, for that most of all.

And I in terror but not in doubt of what I must do in anguish, in haste, wrenched from the earth root after root, the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder - and behind me the others: my brothers forgotten since dawn. In the forest they too had heard, and were pulling their roots in pain out of a thousand years' layers of dead leaves, rolling the rocks away, breaking themselves out of their depths.

By dawn he was gone. We have stood here since, in our new life. We have waited. He does not return.

The poet never must lose despair.

Many people tell me that my poetry is awful. And, for the life of me, I can't decide if they are right, or just stupid.

Miss Dorothy did best part o' pitting his potry togidder. He let it fa' and she cam efter and gethered it oop for him ye kna.

Why do you paint? For exactly the same reason I breathe. That's not an answer. There isn't any answer. How long hasn't there been any answer? As long as I can remember. And how long have you written? As long as I can remember. I mean poetry. So do I.

Here life is, moves; faintly. A wrist. The faint throb of blood, precise, miraculous . . . And they talk of dying! The blood delicately descending and ascending: making an arm. Being an arm. The warm flesh, the dim slender flesh filled with life, slenderer than a miracle, frailer . . . These are the shoulders through which fell the world. The dangerous shoulders of Eve, in god's entire garden newly strolling.

'Doubtless,' said I, 'what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore.

'Prophet!' said I, 'thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!'

Here once, through an alley Titanic, Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul - Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her, And tempted her out of her gloom.

There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified - more supremely noble than this very poem - this poem per se - this poem which is a poem and nothing more - this poem written solely for the poem's sake.

There comes Poe, with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge.

The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of 'a moment of their other lives' - a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.

Within your magic web of hair, lies furled The fire and splendour of the ancient world; The dire gold of the comet's wind-blown hair; The songs that turned to gold the evening air When all the stars of heaven sang for joy.

There is something in Poetry beyond Prose-reason; there are Mysteries in it not to be explained, but admired.

A thousand golden sheaves were lying there, Shining and still, but not for long to stay- As if a thousand girls with golden hair Might rise from where they slept and go away.

In Beauty's dwelling all things fair, And rich, to win her sweet smiles strove; But still young Beauty's only care Was, to watch o'er the lamp of Love.

But tir'd at length poor Beauty slept, And while she rested, wearied quite, Indifference to the dear lamp crept, And quench'd its warm, and splendid light.

To win, beloved Caroline from thee, One thought, in years when we shall sever'd be-- --Sever'd, perchance, by those deep waves, which pour Their billowy murmurs round our native shore,-- For this, I wander'd round the Bow'rs of Song, A weary, and rejected suppliant long, And of the Muses crav'd in humblest tone From their rich wreaths, one simple bud alone: They did but fling their wildest weeds at me, And thus I twin'd them into verse for thee!

Nay, if there's room for poets in the world A little overgrown, (I think there is) Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne's,-this live, throbbing age, That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.

Her poetry is the diary or autobiography - though few diaries or autobiographies compare with it for intentional and, especially, unintentional truth - of an acute psychologist, a wonderful rhetorician, and one of the most individual writers who ever lived, one of those best able to express experience at its most nearly absolute.

Delacroix, lac de sang hante des mauvaises anges, Ombrages par un bois de sapins toujours vert, Ou, sous un ciel chagrin, des fanfares etranges Passent, comme un soupir etouffe de Weber.