Poetry Quotes - page 74

In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry. (G. K. Chesterton)
Through and through the world is infested with quantity To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large.... How large It is no use saying the radium is scarce.... How scarce You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me. View quote
Margaret Atwood
The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems. View quote
Margaret Atwood
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will be mingled with beliefs. View quote
Henri Barbusse
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible. View quote
Jean Genet
I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish. View quote
Gloria Estefan
The world desires illusion (mundus vult decipi) - either the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry. View quote
Mark Knopfler
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. (Antonin Artaud)
The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry. View quote
Erik Satie
When I was in hospital I found I could hardly read or writ. In these circumstances I began to write poems. I found that poetry was the only kind of writing in which I could express my thoughts. One night I dreamed I was lying on the bank of a canal, under machine gun fire. The next morning I wrote it out, Carentan O Caretan, and as I wrote I realized it was not a dream, but the memory of my first time under fire. View quote
Louis Simpson
All poetry is the reproduction of the tones of speech. View quote
Louis Untermeyer
Poetry is enthusiasm with wings of fire; it is the angel of high thoughts, that inspires us with the power of sacrifice. View quote
Giuseppe Mazzini
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity. View quote
Walter Mosley
You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons. View quote
Willem Dafoe
Always fatuity, vulgarity, as soon as human passion is touched. [...] Just as some poetry is of the eye (form, colour) and some of the ear, so Keats is of the palate. Not only has he constant reference to its pleasures, but the general sensation after reading him is one of tasting. 'What's the harm? View quote
E. M. Forster
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch. View quote
E. M. Forster
POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
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. (Jim Jarmusch)
If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry. View quote
Jim Jarmusch
The pianoforte is the most important of all musical instruments its invention was to music what the invention of printing was to poetry. View quote
George Bernard Shaw
Poetry is produced not by the mere caprice of pleasure, but by natural necessity. It is the primary activity of the human mind. View quote
Benedetto Croce
I recently read that it's the left brain that does all that calculating, and the right brain that does the poetry. Somehow I've veered way towards the left. I've been doing it for years. Maybe I do art to balance it out. View quote
Jason Mraz