Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.
Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Poetic language features an iconic rather than a predominantly conventional relationship of form and content in which all language (and cultural) elements, variant as well as invariant, may be involved in the expression of the content. ", "Analysis of the Poetic Text.
The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
My poems are like a dagger Sprouting flowers from the hilt; My poetry is like a fountain Sprinkling streams of coral water.
Thinking in prose is different. I gained an immense amount of respect for people who write prose, and also felt even more sure that the thinking particular to poetry is essential to my life. I need to think, to explore, to question, in poetry. Without that feeling, I am, in some ultimate way, lost.
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.
I was sensitive to music and poetry, and it was around me growing up.
The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.
Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write.
One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
To share poetry is one of the most intimate acts of friendship possible.
If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.
I don't want to, in any way, characterize a race or a people or get accused of racial profiling, but the Irish, as lyrical and romantic as they can be in their poetry, they can be every bit as repressed in their personal relations.