Quotes About Expression

Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

Poetry contains love and holds it in high esteem, even though love always humiliates it by using it merely as a soothing after-shave lotion.

Chess has this in common with making poetry; that the desire for it comes upon the amateur in gusts.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

Thinking is always the stumbling stone to poetry.

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.

I guess the quality that makes one write poetry keeps one from selling it.

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.

Poetry is the only hopeEven if you do not believe it, you have to do it.

Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.

Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.

In poetry, only emotion endures.

Learn poetry by heart. If you know a poem by heart, no one can take it away from you, and you can take advantage of it anytime.

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love; the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.

My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.

Even the most political poem is an act of faith.