Poetry Is Quotes - Page 37

• Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

  Michael Joseph Oakeshott

  Dream, Flower, Wheat

  "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind". Essay by Michael Joseph Oakeshott, 1959.

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• Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.

  Anne Sexton

  Hands, Kitchen, Faces

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• Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

  Adrienne Rich

  Writing, Voice, Stones

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.104, W. W. Norton & Company

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• ... 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.

  Audre Lorde

  Dream, Names, Ideas

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.37, Crossing Press

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• Your friend's poetry is terrible," he said. Clary blinked, caught momentarily off guard. "What?" "I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random.

  Cassandra Clare

  Sound, Vomiting, Caught

  Cassandra Clare (2009). “Sample of the CITYs”, p.36, Simon and Schuster

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• in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Wings, Trying, Apollo

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1951). “Speak, Memory: A Memoir”

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• The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Purpose, Difficult, Persons

  Czeslaw Milosz (2017). “Selected and Last Poems 1931-2004”, p.127, Penguin UK

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• Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.

  John Green

  Emo, Pain, Rain

  John Green (2013). “Paper Towns”, p.114, A&C Black

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• Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Imagination, Poetry, Shadow

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2007). “Poetry as Insurgent Art”, p.50, New Directions Publishing

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• Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.

  Oscar Wilde

  Self, People, Honor

  Oscar Wilde (2005). “Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.51, Prestwick House Inc

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• My duty moves along with my song: I am I am not: that is my destiny. I exist not if I do not attend to the pain of those who suffer: they are my pains. For I cannot be without existing for all, for all who are silent and oppressed, I come from the people and I sing for them: my poetry is song and punnishment.

  Pablo Neruda

  Song, Pain, Moving

  Pablo Neruda (2015). “The Poetry of Pablo Neruda”, p.535, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.

  Gregory Maguire

  Self, Deception, Poetic

  Gregory Maguire (2013). “The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz”, p.163, Harper Collins

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• But Carroll's were more convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way: 1) Babies are illogical. 2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile. 3) Illogical persons are despised. Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles. And: 1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste. 2) No modern poetry is free from affectation. 3) All of your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles. 4) No affected poetry is popular among people of taste. 5) Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles. Therefore, all your poems are uninteresting.

  Steve Martin

  Baby, Real, People

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• Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Inspirational, Motivational, History

  Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, James A. Grimshaw (1998). “Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence”, p.15, University of Missouri Press

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• The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom

  Jacques Lacan

  Reason

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• Poetry is a game of loser-take-all.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Games, Poetry, Loser

  "Pierrot le Fou". www.imdb.com. 1965.

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• Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.

  Henry Beston

  Joy, Impossible, Reverence

  Henry Beston (1956). “The Outermost House”

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• There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

  Alan Watts

  Art, Said, Whole

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• Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.

  William Hazlitt

  Mean, Passion, Writing

  William Hazlitt (1845). “Lectures on the English Poets”, p.9

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• 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.

  Ted Hughes

  Thinking, People, World

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• Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

  Richard Wilbur

  Writing, Self, Talking

  "Richard Wilbur, Winner of the 1957 Poetry Award for Things of This World". Acceptance Speech, www.nationalbook.org. 1957.

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• I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Powerful, Stupid, School

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• I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

  Umberto Eco

  Good Life, Thinking, Later In Life

  "Umberto Eco, The Art of Fiction No. 197". Interview with Lila Azam Zanganeh, 2008.

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• Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

  Antonin Artaud

  Analogies, Association, Destruction

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• Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Exercise, Sea, Infinite

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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