Poetry Quotes - Page 13

• Poetry fettered fetters the human race.

  William Blake

  Race, Proportion, Flourishing

  Jerusalem "To the Public" plate 1 (1815)

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• Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made.

  John Berryman

  Funny, Song, Drinking

  1964 'Dream Song No.63'.

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• In a time of destruction, create something: a poem, a parade, a community, a school, a vow, a moral principle; one peaceful moment.

  Maxine Hong Kingston

  Inspirational, Peace, School

  Maxine Hong Kingston (2003). “The Fifth Book of Peace”, Knopf

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• Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.

  Linton Kwesi Johnson

  Writing, Political, Culture

  "I did my own thing". Interview With Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. March 8, 2008.

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• I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

  Maxine Kumin

  Writing, Wanted

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• You are a Universe of Universes And your Soul a source of Songs.

  Ruben Dario

  Love, Inspirational, Song

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• The future gets no say in who we are.

  Buddy Wakefield

  Future, Fate, Destiny

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• I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative switftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.

  Bernard Herrmann

  Inspirational, Music, Character

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• Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.

  Carl Theodor Dreyer

  Inspiration, Expression, Land

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• Shy gold begins to peep through the sombre green - the wattle's wedding dress - and Spring is near. Then suddenly it seems, one golden morning, the Bush awakes, a living thing. Flowers bloom, birds sing, and all the world puts on its gayest dress to greet the laughing Spring.

  C. J. Dennis

  Nature, Morning, Laughter

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• There is no man more complete than the one who travelled a lot, who changed the shape of his thoughts and his life twenty times.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Life, Change, Travel

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• Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

  Robert Frost

  Grief, Political, Sorrow

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

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• A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can only be a footnote.

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko

  History, Poetic, Footnotes

  "A Precocious Autobiography". Translated from the Russian by Andrew R. MacAndrew,

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• I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

  Jean Cocteau

  Indispensable, Poetry Is, Knows

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• Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

  John Keats

  Inspirational, Reading Poetry, Remembrance

  Letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.) 'The Letters of John Keats' (1958) vol. 1, p. 238

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• Kierkegaard was once asked, 'What is a poet?' He answered that a poet was an unhappy man whose moans and cries of anguish were transformed into ravishing music.

  Langdon Brown Gilkey

  Men, Unhappy, Cry

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• Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Fire, Poetry Is, Fire Inside

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2010). “A Life in Letters”, p.750, Simon and Schuster

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• Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

  Adrian Mitchell

  Inspirational, Funny, People

  Poems (1964) p. 8

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• When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

  Niels Bohr

  Inspirational, Creating, Atoms

  Niels Bohr's response to questions on the nature of language during his first meeting with Werner Heisenberg (Summer 1920), as quoted in "Discussions about Language", 1933, in Robert J. Pranger "Defense Implications of International Indeterminacy" (p. 11), 1972, and in Steve Giles "Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory" (p. 28), 1993.

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• Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

  Plutarch

  Art, Greek, Quiet

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• Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

  Charles Simic

  Firefighter, Enough, Blanket

  Charles Simic (1990). “Selected Poems, 1963-1983”, George Braziller

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• Poetry is frosted fire.

  J. Patrick Lewis

  Fire, Poetry Is

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• Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Healthy, Speech, Poetry Is

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.2097, Delphi Classics

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• Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

  A. E. Housman

  Perfect, Understanding, May

  "The Name and Nature of Poetry". The Leslie Stephen Lecture, Cambridge University, May 09, 1933.

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• Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Mind, Certain, Enjoy

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