What is beautiful enchants me. I mean not just physical beauty but a wider concept of beauty. There is beauty in poetry and in great musical or singing performances. There is beauty everywhere if you can just see it.
On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.
There’s a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves… that never goes away.
The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.
Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.
Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
I used to buy scented poetry books on tour and read aloud to the band. Not what you’d expect, huh?
The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
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.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ’cause it’s important.
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
I don’t like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.
For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!
I’m a black Catholic raised in Decatur, Georgia, which was very gang-infested. Then, I went to an all-white private high school and excelled in sports and wrote poetry, then played football at the University of Georgia, minoring in drama.
Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language’s own means.
Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.
I have had much to learn from Sweden’s poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
I don’t like political poetry, and I don’t write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.
One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
I’ve already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.
Definitely, some of the artistry and poetry has been lost in modern chess. It’s very rare that I play a game where I’m like, ‘Wow, this is really interesting. There were so many possibilities! It was such a rich game.’
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It’s one of the great things poetry does.
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.
One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people’s heads as they listen in the car. You don’t have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it’s just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.
The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.
There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.
There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.
But one does not make living writing poetry unless you’re a professor, and one frankly doesn’t get a lot of girls as a poet.
By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.
I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.
In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.
One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.
I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.
So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.
I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.
You can even express movies and poetry using video games. For those reasons, I’ve decided to create stories through video games.
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn’t play, it has a poignancy to it.
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
Poetry lies its way to the truth.
Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
There is probably nothing wrong with art for art’s sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.
The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.
