"For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew."
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Poetry quotes
Poetry
987 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Poetry quotes (page 18 of 50)
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"Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words."
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"When clever people ask me where I get a poem, I despair."
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"Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books."
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"Before now poetry has taken notice Of wars, and what are wars but politics Transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?"
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"I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation."
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"Summary riposte To the dreary wail There's no knowing what Love is all about. Poets know a lot."
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"Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer made my mate."
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"In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others."
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"To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical."
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"Coleridge received the Person from Porlock And ever after called him a curse, Then why did he hurry to let him in? He could have hid in the house."
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"Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it."
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"If not then you must be trying to hear us and in such cases we cannot be heard. We remain in the darkness, unseen. In the center of unpeeled bananas, we exist. Uncolored by perception. Clothed to the naked eye. Five senses cannot sense the fact of our existence. And that's the only fact. In fact, there are no facts."
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"No time for poetry but exactly what is."
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"I have never injured anybody with a mordant poem; my verse contains charges against nobody. Ingenuous, I have shunned wit steeped in venom--not a letter of mine is dipped in poisonous jest."
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"Then one can't make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes."
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"Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness."
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"My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff."
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"These capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection."
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"You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live."
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