“I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.”
Topic
poetry
850 quotes
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“Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.”
“Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.”
“It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?”
“Poetry a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”
“Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.”
“My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.”
“I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.”
“Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.”
“All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.”
“It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.”
“My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.”
“I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.”
“Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.”
“With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.”
“The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.”
“I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.”
“Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.”
“It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.”
“Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”
“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.”
“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.”
“So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.”
“If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.”