All Quotes By Tag: Poetry

“What happens to a dream deferred?”

“No matter how you feel you have to actlike you are very popular with yourself;very relaxed and purposefulvery unconfusedand notlike you are walking through the sunshinesingingin chains.”

“The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.”

“I came here to be for all and with all,and what I do today in my solitudewill be echoed tomorrow by the multitude.What I say now with one heartwill be said tomorrow by thousands of hearts…”

“i laced my shoes with sorrowand walked a weary roaddead end streetsdon’t come undonewith double knots wing tipped shoesthat walk on airthrough vacant lots”

“He feeds upon her face by day and night,And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.”

“[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one’s own, but one does not like anyone else’s.”

“Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.”

“[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.”

“Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.”

“A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space — a place not just set apart but reverberant — and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.”

“We must listen to poets.”

“I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.”

“Wherever we go we do harm, forgivingourselves as wheels do cement for wearingeach other out. We set this houseon fire, forgetting that we live within.(from “To a Meadowlark,” for M.L. Smoker)”

“Whenever Richard Cory went down town,We people on the pavement looked at him:He was a gentleman from sole to crown,Clean favored, imperially slim.And he was always quietly arrayed,And he was always human when he talked;But still he fluttered pulses when he said,’Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.And he was rich–yes, richer than a king–And admirably schooled in every grace:In fine, we thought that he was everythingTo make us wish that we were in his place.So on we worked, and waited for the light,And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,Went home and put a bullet through his head.”