Quotes on Poetry

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end._x000D_ _x000D_ Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

Peitaho Heavy rains fall on Yuyen, the northland kingdom of swallows. White pages of rain envelop the sky, and fishing boats off the Island of the Emperor Chin disappear on the ocean. Which way have they gone? More than a thousand years ago the mighty emperor Tsao Tsao cracked his whip and drove his army against the Tartars. He left us a poem: "Let us move east to the Stone Mountains." Today we still shiver in the autumn gale, in desolate winds, yet another man is in the world.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.

History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.

For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.