Poetry Is Quotes - Page 11

• The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

  Ted Hughes

  Pain, Voice, Trying

  Ted Hughes, Christopher Reid (2008). “Letters of Ted Hughes”, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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• Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Art, Ideas, Space

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1998). “Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art”, p.89, Oxford University Press

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• The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Keys, Doors, House

  Czeslaw Milosz, “Ars Poetica?”

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• On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.

  Pablo Neruda

  Writing, Humanity, Earth

  Pablo Neruda, Mark Eisner (2004). “The essential Neruda: selected poems”, p.7, City Lights Books

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• Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.

  Mary Oliver

  Moving, Fall, Voice

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

  Nick Hornby

  War, Fighting, Reykjavik

  Nick Hornby (2004). “The Polysyllabic Spree”, McSweeneys Books

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• Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

  Ezra Pound

  Squares, Giving, Mind

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• The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

  Robert Graves

  Religious, Experience, Exaltation

  Robert Graves (2011). “The White Goddess”, p.53, Faber & Faber

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• But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

  Diane Wakoski

  Thinking, Events, Use

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• I write poetry to figure things out. Any time I’m trying to wrap my head around something, poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me.

  Sarah Kay

  Writing, Trying, Strategy

  Interview with Jennifer Messing, journalwomenwriters.wordpress.com. August 5, 2014.

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• Political poetry is the hardest thing to write because you cannot preach to the converted, and if you're only seeking to convert, then write an editorial. I hope I can write about Trump; he's too major a force not to be written about.

  Mary Jo Salter

  Writing, Political

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• Poetry is the memory of language

  Jacques Roubaud

  Memories, Language

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• I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written

  Saul Williams

  Thinking, Doe, Oral Tradition

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• Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Art, Understanding, Alive

  Recalled on his death, 20 Apr1982.

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• Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.

  Randall Jarrell

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Air

  "Poetry and the Age" by Randall Jarrell, Vintage paperback, (p. 127), 1955.

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• For Poetry is the wisdom of the blood,That scarlet tree within, which has the powerTo make dull words bud forth and burst in flower.

  Osbert Sitwell

  Flower, Blood, Tree

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• Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Independent, Sometimes, Reason

  Christian Nestell Bovee (1862). “Intuitions and Summaries of Thought”, p.206

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• The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.

  Matthew Arnold

  School, Differences, Soul

  Essays in Criticism Second Series, "Thomas Gray" (1888)

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• Poetry is an extra hand. It can caress or tickle. It can clench and fight.

  Adrian Mitchell

  Fighting, Hands, Caress

  1972 'Poetry Lives', in the Sunday Times,13 Feb.

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• Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Poetry, Sculpture, Painting

  Walter Savage Landor (1836). “Pericles and Aspasia”, p.149

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• Many other cultures value poetry more than we do. In Ireland, poetry is a top cultural pursuit, the art to end all arts.

  Campbell McGrath

  Art, Other Cultures, Ends

  "Campbell McGrath on Poetry, Walt Whitman and Schaefer Beer". Interview with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, www.wsj.com. March 1, 2008.

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• Traditionally poetry is written in lines. But the prose poem is the kind of poem that isn't written in lines. It is lyrical prose that uses the tricks of poetry, such as dense imagery. This is a big topic of debate in poetry land. There's no perfect definition.

  Campbell McGrath

  Land, Perfect, Use

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• Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

  Mary Oliver

  Ideas, Poetry, Feelings

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.108, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.

  Marianne Moore

  Writing, Categories

  Interview with Donald Hall, pub.'Paris Review' The Art of Poetry, no 26 (1961), 1960.

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• We need a safe place, a reserve of truth, a place where words kindle ideas and set ideas sparking off in others, a word sanctuary. Poetry is this gathering place of words.

  Allison Mackie

  Ideas, Poetry, Gathering

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