Poetry

"To connect the external object with the internal emotion is the sweetest privilege of poetry."

"Poetry is the immortality of earth: where shall we look for our noblest thoughts, and our tenderest feelings, but in its eternal pages?"

"There's a reason for poetry... Poetry is a very nonlinear use of language, where the meaning is more than just the sum of the parts. And science requires that it be nothing more than the sum of the parts. And just the fact that there's stuff to explain out there that's more than the sum of the parts means that the traditional approach, just characterizing the parts and the relations, is not going to be adequate for capturing the essence of many systems that you would like to be able to do. That's not to say that there isn't a way to do it in a more scientific way than poetry, but I just like the feeling that culturally there's going to be more of something like poetry in the future of science."

"Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance"

"Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself"

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding."

"For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."

"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."

"The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom."

"Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors."

"The form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women."

"As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines."

"A poem should not mean But be."

"Bless poetry books that cross oceans in battered envelopes, bearing small flames of words."

"As for me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because this self-lust has a delightful dying fall in my soul."

"poetry is an elusive thing that can neither be hidden nor locked away."

"Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"

"Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface. There are epochs, however, when mankind, not satisfied with the present, yearning like the ploughman for the abyssal strata of time, thirsts for the virgin soil of time. Revolution in art inevitably leads to Classicism, not because David reaped the harvest of Robespierre, but because that is what the earth desires."

"Many a bard's untimely death Lends unto his verses breath; Here's a song was never sung: Growing old is dying young."

"Oh, I didn't realize that you wrote poetry I didn't realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry, Mr. Shankly"

"In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets."

"The quality of poetry is not strained. It has not to abide our repeated questions. It tests and is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry but the hearer that is to be judged."

"I never wanted to be a poet. I just wanted to be a human being. Anyone who wants to be a poet is out of his mind. Either you are one or you are not. Most poets are not poets. To be a real artist is a unique and valuable asset to this planet."

"My unpremeditated verse."

"Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter…the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing"

"Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignore most people."

"The bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. If you were just some magician, if you'd pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's gonna put a curse on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your milk's gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or something like that—no big deal. You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a skillful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing, at what a twat you were."

"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason."

"Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to stay that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a , one should read."

"Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself. Not a message that comes at the end of the poem, more like a pathological condition that deforms every word – a resonance, a manner of speaking, a nervous tic, a pressure. And this invisible subject only shows up when you're speaking the language that you speak when no one is there to correct or applaud you. Remembering that language is the whole skill of writing well."

"It is not difficult to understand the resistance to the idea of poetry as a performing art. For years our concept of poetry and its presentation has been dominated by male academic ivory towerites. We have been conditioned to find poetry isolated and secluded from the masses of people, a pursuit only to be understood and especially enjoyed by those who possess trained minds and favored breeding. It has long been touted as an art form to be admired for its stylistic machinations with severe limitations on its concepts and subject matter...In the 1960s, things began to change. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets and began voicing other concerns. Concerns that touched our lives: a war in a far-away pace with an unknown people; the separateness of America's ethnic minorities and inequality of her perceptions of them; the role of women and the rape of our minds and bodies. The poets and poetry also changed. The concerns voiced by people in the streets appeared on pages clutched by angry hands. The audiences and the forums also began changing. Women poets started leaving the university reading rooms and coffeehouses and began going to women's centers. The move toward consciousness had created a different need and a new way to approach poetry and its presentation. Women's centers, which in many instances were represented by a single night allocated to women in the backroom of a coffeehouse or YWCA, started sponsoring poetry reading. Women began applying the lessons learned in consciousness-raising work and to their approach to other writers. The competitiveness and the one-upmanship of the male poetry scene was replaced by a joyful sharing of ideas and a commitment to sisterhood."

"I do physics in order to earn my living, and I do poetry in order to keep alive."

"Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared."

"The only thing worse than poetry? Abstract poetry, which exists solely to make students feel stupid and professors feel smug."

"Poetry changes with every generation, but it does not improve or progress. It just changes its styles, trappings and some of its obsessions, but we can still enjoy Sappho and Homer; they are today's news as much as when they were written or recited."

"Poems told me there were other people who felt the way I felt. That was validation for the person I was. Poems can mean survival."

"I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty."

"Poetry emerging from a poet enters into the reader only when it comes within the readers’ 'sphere of intellect."

"A reader cannot take poetry by expanding it beyond his/her consciousness, rather can take by shrinking it within."

"There exists a chance of every poem getting changed while reaching every reader. This ‘getting changed’ is a form of ‘getting translated’, in a way. So, every assimilation of any poem is a translation."

"A good poem cannot be written with one's mind on the earth. Though one has to write poems about the earth and existence, one cannot write poems while staying grounded. To write an outstanding poem, a flight to the heights of transcendence is needed. However, a person cannot always remain in that elevated state. When one descends, they touch the earth and write ordinary stuff."

"Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale, Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs, And solid pudding against empty praise."

"A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along."

"What woful stuff this madrigal would be, In some starv'd hackney sonneteer or me! But let a lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens! how the style refines."

"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own."

"It is very probable that the Hindenburg Line to which the defence of our traditions retired as a result of the onslaughts of the last century will be blown up in the near future. If this should happen a mental chaos such as man has never experienced may be expected. We shall then be thrown back...upon poetry. It is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos."

"Who needs poetry? All of us do. Poetry has always been the voice of the inner self, the carrier of revelations, dreams, and visions that often defy expression in ordinary prose."

"Lord but I dislike poetry. How can anyone remember words that aren’t put to music?"

"Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know."

"There is one kind of knowledge-infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry."