Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone. "

Edward Hirsch

Alone

You

Poetry

Related Quotes:

" As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines. "

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Advances

Almost

Civilization

" I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat. "

Paul Engle

Poetry

Write

" Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves. "

" There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army. "

" Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers. "

" If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. "

" Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour. "

" There's a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that's a bit blurred in my mind. "

" Poetry lies its way to the truth. "

" I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan. "

Jacques Derrida

" I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months. "

" I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music. "

" Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another. "

" One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way. "

" I grew up in a place in which, if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it. "

" A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others. "

" You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words. "

" You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you. "

" For this reason poets and artists developed the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake. The community did not appear to need them, so, tit for tat, they did not need the community. This being granted, it was no longer necessary or even desirable to make one's poetry either intelligible or sympathetic to the community. "

" What's the function of poetry? It's to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: 'Wow, I've experienced that, but you've expressed it so much better.' "

" Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody. "

" Where I come from, we sing poetry. "

" I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm. "

" I like cups of tea and reading books and poetry and old people things. "

" Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like. "

" Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose. "

" 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. "

" I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. "

Derek Walcott

Writing

Prayer

" Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. "

" For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect. "

Tony Harrison

Poetry

Heart