Quotes About Expression

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

Poetry's object is truth.

Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.

What can be explained is not poetry.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.

My ear is not working, my poetry ear. I can't write a line that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard.

I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.

Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit.

I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy.

I myself have never called what I write anti-poetry. I also think that my poetry should not be only known as the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal but rather as Nicaraguan poetry.

Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

I feel the written word, poetry and literature is just one of the most beautiful things that human beings do. So we have to fight for it.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

Poetry is the disease of the brain.

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

A song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.

Poetry is language trying to become bodily experience.

I still believe in the need for guitars and drums and desperate poetry.

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.