Poetry Quotes - Page 3

• If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.

  Stephen Spender

  Cutting, Shaving, Ifs

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• Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Water, Ink, Add

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, W. B. Rönnfeldt (1898*). “Goethe's Criticisms, Reflections, and Maxims”

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• Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.

  Pablo Neruda

  Writing, Men, Hands

  Milton Rogovin, Pablo Neruda, Dennis Maloney, Robert Bly (1984). “Windows that open inward: images of Chile”, White Pine Pr

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• For me, poetry is an impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.

  Maxwell Bodenheim

  Wind, Paint, Colour

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• Sad is his lot, who, once at least in his life, has not been a poet.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Poet

  Alphonse de Lamartine (1854). “Memoirs of celebrated characters”, p.341

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• Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

  Jeremy Bentham

  Fall, Goes On, Lines

  In M. St. J. Packe 'The Life of John Stuart Mill' (1954) bk. 1, ch. 2

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• Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Roles, Manipulation, Spontaneous

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• I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

  William Wordsworth

  Powerful, Feelings, Mind

  William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth (1815). “Poems”, p.388

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

  Robert Graves

  Perfect, Immature, World

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• I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

  Jim Harrison

  Book, Magazines, Literature

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• It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

  Lord Byron

  Earthquakes, Imagination, Eruption

  Letter to Annabella Milbanke, 29 November 1813, in L. A. Marchand (ed.) 'Byron's Letters and Journals' vol. 3 (1974)

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• Poetry is when you talk to yourself.

  William Hughes Mearns

  Poetry Is

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• Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen.

  Fleur Adcock

  Communication, Way, Openness

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• Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.

  Samuel Johnson

  Cutting, Rocks, Genius

  To Hannah More, who had expressed a wonder that the poet who had written 'Paradise Lost' should write such poor Sonnets, in James Boswell 'The Life of Samuel Johnson' (1791) vol. 4, p. 305 (13 June 1784)

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• There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.

  William Cowper

  Pain, Poetic, Pleasure

  'The Task' (1785) bk. 2 'The Timepiece' l. 285

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• These poems are a mental sketch as formed / Passage by passage of light and shade / Maintained and preserved to this point / Brought together in paper and mineral ink

  Kenji Miyazawa

  Light, Together, Ink

  Kenji Miyazawa (2007). “Strong in the Rain: Selected Poems”, Bloodaxe Books Limited

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• For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Argument

  1844 Essays: Second Series,'The Poet'.

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• The true poet dreams being awake.

  Charles Lamb

  Dream, Poet, Awake

  Charles Lamb (1835). “Essays of Elia”, p.206

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• Poetry is a means of redemption.

  Wallace Stevens

  Mean, Redemption, Poetry Is

  1957 Opus Posthumous, Aphorisms,'Adagia'.

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• Poetry must be as well written as prose.

  Ezra Pound

  Wells, Prose, Written

  Letter to Harriet Monroe, Jan. 1915

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• Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters.

  e. e. cummings

  Writing, Sake, Matter

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• There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop.

  Augustus William Hare

  Flower, Garden, Smell

  Julius Charles HARE (Archdeacon of Lewes. and HARE (Augustus William)), Augustus William HARE (1847). “Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers. Third edition. First Series”, p.199

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• Every old poem is sacred.

  Horace

  Art, Sacred

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• The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong.

  George Meredith

  Men, Gone, He Man

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• The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

  Charles Olson

  Sound, Firsts

  Charles Olson (1979). “Muthologos: the collected lectures & interviews”

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