Quotes on Poetry Is

Poetry is a process of getting back to the unconscious. Hence, I am always writing-even when I'm not facing the white space. I feel writers are like reservoirs of images. We take in what is around us.

Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Poetry, my dear friends, is a sacred incarnation of a smile. Poetry is a sigh that dries the tears. Poetry is a spirit who dwells in the soul, whose nourishment is the heart, whose wine is affection. Poetry that comes not in this form is a false messiah.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

The specific excellence of verbal expression in poetry is to be clear without being low.

I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing more natural, as in how it is lived in the person. We don’t separate thinking from feeling in real life, so why should we separate it in writing?

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

When a man's life becomes poetry, becomes a song, becomes a work of art, a creativity, he has become a sannyasin. Whether he knows it or not, it does not matter. The word 'sannyas' does not matter; what matters is the content.

Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections... science is a ladder... poetry is a winged flight... An artistic masterpiece exists for all time... Dante does not efface Homer.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.

The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights.