Poetry Quotes - page 77

All poetry is difficult to read The sense of it anyhow. (Robert Browning)
Poetry puts the infinite within the finite. View quote
Robert Browning
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love. View quote
Erica Jong
Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan. View quote
Erica Jong
What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave. View quote
Erica Jong
Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have. View quote
Erica Jong
I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper. View quote
Erica Jong
Poetry and prayer are very similar. View quote
Carol Ann Duffy
I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way. View quote
Carol Ann Duffy
I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it. (Carol Ann Duffy)
It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal. View quote
Carol Ann Duffy
I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English. View quote
Alfred Nobel
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called "other", which is simply another universe, another planet, another species. View quote
Theodore Sturgeon
Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry. View quote
Julie Taymor
Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry. ... A lot of what I do in theater is cinematic, and a lot of what I do in film is theatrical, but there are different rules to it. View quote
Julie Taymor
Prose is walking; poetry is flying. View quote
Galway Kinnell
Real warriors like William Burroughs or Leonard Cohen or Wallace Stevens examine the hollow as well as anybody; they get in there, look far into the dark, and yet come out with poetry. View quote
Ken Kesey
Poems have helped me figure out a lot about queer sexuality – it is a big hill to climb. The ability to transform myself in poetry helps me imagine myself differently in the real world. View quote
Danez Smith
The discipline of poetry may be expected first to teach the evocative power of words, to introduce the student, if we may so put it, to the mighty power of symbolism, and then to show him that there are ways of feeling about things which are not provincial either in space or time. View quote
Richard Weaver
All of us have had the experience of finding a particularly felicitous phrase in poetry and of feeling: "This is what the world really means; he has hit it closer than anyone has ever hit it before.”. (Richard Weaver)
The young come to us creatures of imagination and strong affection; they want to feel, but they don't know how-that is to say, they do not know the right objects and the right measures. And it is entirely certain that if we leave them to the sort of education obtainable today for extra-scholastic sources, the great majority will be schooled in the two vices of sentimentality and brutality. Now great poetry, rightly interpreted, is the surest antidote to both of these. In contrast with journalists and others, the great poets relate the events of history to a pure or noble metaphysical dream, which our students will have all their lives as a protecting arch over their system of values. View quote
Richard Weaver
There is a sentimental poetry, and it will have to be exposed (not censored. certainly; for to omit criticism of it would deprive us of our fairest chance to combat the sentimental rhetoric of the student's environment). View quote
Richard Weaver
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots. View quote
Camille Paglia
Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility. View quote
Camille Paglia