Quotes on Poetry Is

Poems infatuated with their own smarts and detached from any emotional grounding can leave the reader feeling lonely, empty and ashamed for having expected more. Like icy adolescents, such poetry is more interested in commiserating than acknowledging that feelings — the sentiments that make us susceptible to sentimentality — actually exist.

Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force.

... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

Let my name perish, -- the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music,_x000D_ and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it.

Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.

Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart.

Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

The secret of poetry is never explained,— is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. 'T is as easy as breath. 'T is like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and none knows what it is.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.