All Quotes By Tag: Poetry

“Pleasured equallyIn seeking as in finding,Each detail minding,Old Walt went seekingAnd finding.”

“Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.”

“I can’t help but notice that you keep writing love poetry to my wife. Well, you see, I married her, which makes her my wife. You know what you might want to try? Writing some poems about the sunset. The sunset isn’t fucking married.”

“It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn’t sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work — like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work. . . . Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that ‘rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things’? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: ‘Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do’st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.”

“Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.”

“Love SongHow can I keep my soul in me, so thatit doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raiseit high enough, past you, to other things?I would like to shelter it, among remotelost objects, in some dark and silent placethat doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.Yet everything that touches us, me and you,takes us together like a violin’s bow,which draws one voice out of two separate strings.Upon what instrument are we two spanned?And what musician holds us in his hand?Oh sweetest song.”

“THOUGH you are in your shining days,Voices among the crowdAnd new friends busy with your praise,Be not unkind or proud,But think about old friends the most:Time’s bitter flood will rise,Your beauty perish and be lostFor all eyes but these eyes.”

“If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.”

“A wealth you cannot imagineflows through you.Do not consider what strangers say.Be secluded in your secret heart-house,that bowl of silence.”

“On Waterloo Bridge where we said our goodbyes,the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.I wipe them away with a black woolly gloveAnd try not to notice I’ve fallen in loveOn Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:This is nothing. you’re high on the charm and the drink.But the juke-box inside me is playing a songThat says something different. And when was it wrong?On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hairI am tempted to skip. You’re a fool. I don’t care.the head does its best but the heart is the boss-I admit it before I am halfway across”

“In pale moonlight / the wisteria’s scent / comes from far away.”

“In the great green room, there was a telephoneAnd a red balloonAnd a picture of a cat jumping over the moon…”

“Put your ears to the ground, to the sky, to the sun and the moon… tune in to Mother Earth’s sweet song. She has messages to say, knowledge to relay, inspiration to convey… there is much for you to learn. Your journey has just begun.”

“Thus weary of the world, away she hies,And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aidTheir mistress mounted through the empty skiesIn her light chariot quickly is convey’d;Holding their course to Paphos, where their queenMeans to immure herself and not be seen.”

“I am filled time and againwith a heart-aching wonder when I thinkof the fireand frost of memoriesof the everlastingnessof lovethe solace of familyand the power of prayer.”