Quotes on Poetic

In the poetic tradition, the heart's affections are indeed holy, and if organizations are asking for people's hearts and minds, they are asking in a way for their holy and hidden affections at the same time.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.

In America, to be ID'd - sorted, tagged, and permanently filed - is to lose a bit of one's soul. To die a little. This sounds like a subtle, poetic notion. It's not. In American legal and cultural tradition, one essential privilege of citizenship is not having to prove it on demand.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve.

I know that when you are experiencing failure, it's pretty damn painful. It is easy in retrospect to wax poetic about it. But in the moment, you don't think you will survive, let alone have the time to reflect on how valuable those lessons will be for you in the future.

Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership's exquisite sensitivity.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can only be a footnote.

No one could ad lib like Peter. You would think that it was all scripted, he was so poetic, but it wasn't.

For wheresoe'er I turn my ravish'd eyes, Gay gilded scenes and shining prospects rise, Poetic fields encompass me around, And still I seem to tread on classic ground.

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.

Most of my life I have played a lot of famous people but most of them were dead so you have a poetic license.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

Memory exercised in a particular way is a natural gift of poetic genius. The poet above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense impressions which he has experienced and which he can relive again as though with all their original freshness.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.